Hello Everyone,
There has been a great deal of discussion on the USGenWeb list for state coordinators,
regarding an upcoming addition of
rootsweb/ancestry.com banners being put on all pages
which are hosted by
rootsweb.com.
I have not been passing along all of the discussion e-mails, because I do not want to
bombard all of you with possibly irrelevant postings (some of you do not have your web
pages at rootsweb), and also I am adverse to "political" type arguments about
genweb. However, this issue does effect those of us who have USGenWeb pages online at
rootsweb. You are the only one who can decide whether the issue is important to you or
not.
Personally, I am not certain that the addition of the banner is a welcome or unwelcome
addition. In response to postings on the state coordinators list, I have only made 2
comments as follows:
1) Just my 2-cents: Though it sounds nice to say "free" genealogy, it just is
NOT so. People donate time and money to post information online. It is actually very
misleading to continually use the word "free." As related in the e-mail below:
"Operating a large Internet site is expensive. Last year, even with volunteer labor,
the hardware, bandwidth, and other expenses incurred by RootsWeb exceeded $60,000..."
If having a banner on a page will allow volunteers to have "free" web space, is
it really so bad?
2) The free ancestry subscription is a great suggestion. ;-)
If this banner is at the top of each page, it seems it would give the mistaken
impression to visitors that
Ancestry.com,
Rootsweb.com or USGenWeb actually
author and/or own the individual pages. Shouldn't the authors be allowed top
billing instead? What if the banner were at the side of the page instead?
BTW: The suggestion of the free ancestry subscription, though a nice idea, was made in
jest, since I would doubt it would happen.
If you have pages on rootsweb, and would like to follow the discussion, the state
coordinator's list is archived at
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/STATE-COORD.
As you know, the main VTGenWeb state site is online at my own web space (not rootsweb),
and will, of course remain where it is. I do have rootsweb space for a couple of the
county and town sites, and have not yet decided if they should be moved. If any of you
have any questions or comments, please feel free to e-mail me personally.
--Ann Mensch
VTGenWeb:
http://home.att.net/~Local_History/VT_History.htm