IAJGS Conference: I Couldn’t Put it Down! Series: Flipboard Your Family History

I started out my third full day at the International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies or IAJGS Conference with a presentation by the present president of the organization, Marlis Humphrey. The class was described as follows:

I Couldn’t Put it Down! Series: Flipboard Your Family History Watch as we build a personal Flipboard e-magazine with typical family history content and genealogical artifacts. Learn how to use YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter to build the e-magazine and how to arrange the sections, edit, create a cover, and share your e-magazine with your family on an iPad, iPhone, iPod, Android, Kindle Fire, or NOOK, PC, or Mac. Experience the beautiful simplicity and interactive interface of a family history e-magazine that your family will treasure.

Marlis introduces Flipboard as a substitute for the discontinued Google Reader. I have Flipboad on both my iPhone and my iPad, but so far, I have not been overly engaged with the app. From my standpoint, the information is not compact enough and takes too much interaction to view a long list of blog feeds. That is the reason I came to the class, to see if there was something I was missing.

Like most of what I have experienced so far at this IAJGS Conference, I get more than I expected or imagined. One issue that arose in the context of the presentation was the copyright issue of linking to a document or image versus making a copy. I will have more to say about this issue in another post.

Marlis presents details of how to incorporate your own blog into a Flipboad magazine format. I realize that some genealogists have used Flipboard to publish a magazine, particularly at the last RootsTech Conference, but I have not seen any evidence that Flipboard has “caught on” as an alternative to all of the social media including primary publication in a blog. She explains this issue in the handout:

What is Flipboard?

A digital magazine format app designed initially for social network and news feed aggregation. The highly visual interface is known for its beautiful graphical magazine-like reformatting of ordinary content – resulting in an improved reading experience. New functionality allows a user to create/curate his/her own personal digital magazine.

After hearing the presentation, I am impressed that Flipboard and other similar apps could be a significant advance from the present blog format. I am wondering however, how much exposure you can get using Flipboard as opposed to Blogger. If the idea is that you are overlapping or duplicating content, simply for a presentation option, I am skeptical that I can use this venue, but Marlis is very convincing. It reminds me of my recent re-initiation to using Evernote. Both Flipboard and Evernote seem to have many more functions than I have been using in the past.

This class highlights the importance of attending conferences. The subject of this presentation was not something I would have looked at absent the incentive of attending a convenient class. If you want to find out more about Flipboard and the possibility of using this platform to publish your family history information, including photos, stories, audio and video clips with the option of publishing it all on the social networking sites, you may want to look at the tutorials at Flipboard Tutorials.