Flickring family history.

Family pictures, snapshots, old formal portraits are a great way to pull out stories and family history from the older generations. The trouble is, whenever this would happen with my mother, or grandparents, I never wrote any of it down. I've long wanted to know more about my family history, but never had time to do the whole genealogy thing. I did briefly try some genealogy software, but it only helps you to record the data.

My mom loves pictures, and on one of my trips to visit her, I asked her if she wanted the negatives. I was interested in scanning them to save them digitally "for the future." Of course the negatives would probably outlast any computer media I would put them on, but honestly I coveted the photos. I took them home and eventually started scanning them and putting them up on flickr.
When I emailed my mom to show her, she started commenting (on flickr) on the photos making corrections to my titles, and dates, etc. Now flickr isn't really designed as a genealogy collab site, but it was a nice comfortable way for my mom and I to interact. I've thought of using the flickr API to build just such a genealogical collab site, but the nice thing about using photo commenting on a photo commenting site is that it's simple, and that's especially important if you can't train your distant (she lives in Kansas) mother in some specialized software.

Not that I've given up on the idea however. I think using flickr to capture the data is key, and there may be a few minor enhancements that could be made with greasemonkey scripts. It would also be cool to do a mashup that allows you to display a family tree and click on the nodes to bring up pictures of those people. Flickr did a cool thing recently that I only recently accepted as a good thing: hiding "machine tags." Tags with a certain syntax, like geolat:147.222 are hidden, but still available from the api. I think this is key for developing applications like this, as any metadata you would like to define for this mashup wouldn't clutter the flickr interface, but be available to your program. Guess I'd better get busy....