Comcast reads blogs, provides customer service through Twitter
More and more companies are starting to embrace the social web. Comcast discovered that communicating and following up with unsatisfied customers through third party web sites (personal blogs, Twitter, etc) can have a positive effect.
Of course, that's a Good Thing™, because as a (due to lack of alternatives, sometimes forced) customer it often seems that one is interacting with a large, faceless corporation that appears to care only about taking your money, and if you're lucky, providing just enough service to you in return that it's not worth the hassle of trying to complain to them directly.
Comcast's new approach will certainly help to remind everyone that even large companies consist of real people that get up in the morning, go to work and, for the most part, work hard every day. Of course, just because they decide to dedicate some of their staff to scour the Internet for frustrated customers doesn't necessarily mean their internal business processes or policies will improve, but hey, it's a start. And in this case it seems that Frank Eliason, digital care manager at Comcast, is the person who spearheaded this new effort.
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itsourtree.com - Social Network for Your Whole Family
Ever been wanting to map out your family tree in an intuitive format and work on it collaboratively with other family members? Check out itsourtree.com, which is essentially a social network site for your extended family.
So far I've found genealogy software to be quite clumsy, but Hamburg, Germany based OSN Online Social Networking GmbH has build a pretty solid foundation for making family trees intuitive and fun.
With my family being spread across (at least) two continents, it's actually helped get back in touch with some of the folks that I haven't seen in years.
The approach taken here is quite interesting as it allows one to add a person to the family tree, enter their email address to invite them and let them modify the tree. The result is a recursive chain reaction of spouses adding their side of the family.
Just a few weeks ago my mom and I talked about our family history. I find it interesting to know where I came from and its quite exciting, like a little treasure hunt, to try to follow leads and discover potential new distant relatives. And it also just makes sense to know a little bit about your ancestors' medical history for the benefit of your own health.
Luckily, my mom's dad has a relatively rare last name (the map to the right is a distribution of known people in Germany with that last name, and there aren't that many even today). Armed with that, few family records, and my mom's wits and ingenuity, she was able to dig up quite a bit of information. Using sites such as FamilySearch.org, ellisislandrecords.org, and random bits of information revealed through various search engines, we've found records reaching all the way back to the 17th century (a wedding record from 1696).
She told me about a ship, the John Bertram, and sent me the ship's passenger manifest that apparently carried some of our ancestors (a couple aged 58 and 62) from Hamburg, Germany to New York in 1866. A Google search for "John Bertram" turned up a random geocities page with more information about the ship.
The U.S., later Hamburg, ship JOHN BERTRAM was built as an "extreme clipper" at East Boston, by Ewell & Jackson, in the short time of 61 days, and launched on 9 December 1850. She was built under the supervision of Capt. Glidden for the Glidden & Williams Line of Boston-San Francisco packets, and was owned jointly by Glidden & Williams, of Boston, and Flint, Peabody & Co, of San Francisco. She was named after the well-known Salem sea captain and merchant, John Bertram. 1,080/778 tons (old/new measurement); 173/180/190 x 37 x 20 feet(keel/deck/overall length x beam x depth of hold); her figurehead was a representation of an eagle on the wing, and on her stern was a medallion bust of her namesake.
Excuse me for a minute while my mind imagines an epic motion picture style flashback to 1866 where the farmers couple Johann (58) and Maria Lubsch (62) venture on a months-long journey, presumably leaving behind most of their belongings (how do you pack up a farm?), and possibly fight fierce weather conditions on their way to the New World. It's not like it was a Disney Cruise. And I'm guessing they didn't call ahead to make hotel reservations, considering Graham Bell didn't speak into his first phone roughly ten years later on March 10, 1876.
We have yet to figure out exactly what happened to this couple. Why did they leave? Where did they go? Did they have kids? (hint: she probably didn't, but he might have). We don't know, and while itsourtree.com isn't going to answer those questions either, it's encouraged and helped us organize our family history.
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