Packing My Bags

Hello. My name is Jen, and I'm a blogger. 

In exactly one month from today, I'll be heading slightly southwest to Las Vegas, Nevada for the National Genealogical Society 2013 Family History Conference! I am excited for a whole bunch of reasons, and I simply cannot wait to get there! 

During the conference, I will be blogging away as an Official Blogger... but not here. Nope! I'll be over on The In-Depth Genealogist blog, collaborating with fellow pirate women, Stephanie Pitcher Fishman and Terri O'Connell, who are also attending. Together, we will represent the team at IDG, missing only 1/4 of our leadership; Jennifer Alford (but, she'll be at home helping us out!)

Another piece of the week I am super excited about? The three of us will also be hosting #genchat from the conference! The twitter based collaboration for genealogists will occur on Friday, May 10 LIVE from Vegas! We will be releasing the details as we get closer to departure date, but you can bet that a true social media event will be taking place that evening, and we are certainly hoping that many of our fellow conference attendees will join us in the fun! 

(If you haven't yet experienced #genchat, read all about it on Conference Keeper and come learn with us on April 12, as we discuss the FamilySearch Wiki!)

Over the next four weeks, I'll be posting more and more - on all the accounts I have! - about the conference. I love conferences. I love social media. It's all coming together for me in May! Posts will be here, on IDG and on the Conference Keeper blog: CK Updates! 

I am going to issue an invitation, too, to you. If you blog, if you blog about genealogy, if you are going to or will be blogging about the NGS Conference this year, please join our little group over on Facebook. IDG has created a group just for Genealogy Bloggers at NGS 2013; and we're using it as a platform for geneabloggers to communicate, make plans, share ideas and little tidbits we pick up about Vegas itself. All sorts of preparation for the conference. During the actual event, we'll be using it to share posts and arrange meet ups. Come be a part of the community! We'd love to have you. 

Which hashtag is right for me? #Twitter

Recently, Marian Pierre-Louis posed a question on Google+:

"Question for all you social media friends out there: Have any of you ever done a study to determine which Twitter keywords have strong, loyal followings and which keywords seem to remain rapid fire and random without a core group? Just wondering..."

Although she was not referring to specifically genealogy related terms, her questions and further comments were intriguing to me, so I decided to do a little digging.

I found the site, www.HashTracking.com. You input a hashtag, and it tells you how many original tweets, retweets and mentions used that tag in the last twenty-four hours.

Here's a quick look at my results. I did this from 4:10pm - 4:15pm on 11 June 2012. For comparison purposes, I used common genealogy tags that I've seen used:

• #genealogy: 359 original tweets, 89 retweets, 21 mentions
• #familyhistory: 98 original tweets, 26 retweets, 7 mentions
• #ancestry: 28 original tweets, 2 retweets, 0 mentions
• #history: 829 original tweets, 552 retweets, 119 mentions
• #socialmedia: 1194 original tweets, 269 retweets, 37 mentions
• #archives: 187 original tweets, 81 retweets, 4 mentions

 I think, simply, an interesting look at the use of social media as our community continues to grow online. Personally, I try to use as many as possible in each post, within the confines of 140 characters.

The question posed is still one to be considered, and I thank Marian for putting it out there for us to spend a few minutes pondering. I would pass it forward to all of you: what hashtags do you use regularly, what do you use in passing?