Neal and Amy will both be presenters at the annual Association of Personal Historians conference in Nashville, Tennessee, November 8-12, 2007. Neal will speak on “Smart Publishing” and Amy will give two presentations: “Mining the Web for Personal History Gold” and “From Shoeboxes to Books: Writing Great Personal Histories”.

FamilyLearn is sponsoring a one hour demonstration of MemoryPress at the APH conference, on Friday, November 9, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Franklin room. We invite all personal historians to attend.

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So in case you didn’t notice, we haven’t posted an update in quite some time. Things have been really busy around here. We’ve had lots of changes, and they’ve all contributed to great things. I wanted to tell everyone about a really cool new feature we’ve implemented.

Before now, your guests could see the contents of the book, but only in text form. They didn’t see the nicely laid out pages with all the photos. We’ve changed this so that your guests can actually turn the pages of the book and see it the way you do. It’s amazing! It really helps give your friends and family an idea of what you are working on, and inspires them to contribute to your project. If you want to check it you you can look at one of our example books:

www.memorypress.com/start
ID: jana
PW: nelson

You will get to see the real book, and how much easier we have made it to Contribute to the book. Try it with one of your own books as well, and let us know what you think of the change. Our goal is to make books that can be easily shared with family and friends, and I think this new feature has really accomplished that.

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Thanks to Cheryl at Blooking Central for helping to clarify the mashable article. Check Blooking Central out…
Says Cheryl, I intend for Blooking Central to be “Everything (eventually) that you could want to know about blooks: how to blog with an eye on getting published, software for converting your blog, and publishers/agents/editors that might be interested.”

We know some of our customers have intentions of selling Memoirs they publish on MemoryPress and we recommend you keep up with Cheryl’s insights.

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We’re happy to launch a browse and search interface to FamilyLearn, the world’s most enjoyed family story library. We’re in the process of migrating thousands of photos and books from the previous system and so not all the content is showing up in searches at this time. It will soon.

Two notes of interest.

First, we’ve only launched title-based search. People, author and full-text search will be added in the future.

Second, we’ve made all the books private by default (except for invitees of course). Some of you may want to share your history with the world. You can do this by searching for the title of your book, clicking on “Edit Public Information,” and deselecting “Make book contents private.” Finally, click “Save” and your done.

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Today we finally added another book to the MemoryPress home page.

We hope that we will soon win out the keyword “family history publishing” in searches on Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask. This is the new URL: http://memorypress.familylearn.com/family-history-publishing

We will be adding more types of books as time moves on. We have been considering a page for each of the following:

• wedding anniversary
• family recipe book (I was thinking this recipe book could have the story behind your family recipes. It could be like family history built around recipes. Every family recipe links to a story that is a part of your family history.)
• mother
• father
• retirement
• tribute
• pet
• custom

If you have a suggestion of what kinds of books you would like, please comment below. We need your feedback.

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Here is another glowing blog review: AnceStories: The Stories of My Ancestors: A New Wedding Memory Album by MemoryPress. Miriam just started a wedding memory book.

My favorite part from Miriam’s review:

Now I have to say that first of all, the technological support at MemoryPress is fabulous! …The friendly, patient, helpful service was a wonderful example of the support customers are certain to receive from this company!

I can hardly wait to get started…

Thanks Miriam!

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Myrt, from DearMyrtle.com, interviewed Jeffrey and me about MemoryPress and FamilyLearn (listen to just the section on MemoryPress below) this morning after deciding she would use MemoryPress to publish her family history. Myrt has tried publishing books on Blurb and LuLu; she loves MemoryPress because she can collaborate with family and friends to create her book. Everyone sees the book come to life and she doesn’t have to do it alone.

Mryt is sharp, fast and informative. She really does a ton of work for her readers. This podcast is worth the listen and DearMyrtle.com is worth subscribing to. (UPDATE - after posting this podcast, our customers and others let us know what an honor it is for Ol’ Myrt to choose us for publishing her family history as she is one of the top genealogy bloggers/speakers in the world of 12 years - Jeff and I are glad we didn’t know in the interview or we would have felt pretty nervous.)

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For those of you who don’t know yet, MemoryPress is a service of FamilyLearn. FamilyLearn is going to be the world’s most enjoyed family library.

Last night we changed FamilyLearn’s tag line. It is now “your family library”. Previously it was “heart to heart”.

Why did we change it? “heart to heart” can mean just about anything, therefore it basically means nothing. “your family library” on the other hand, is descriptive and clear. It fits FamilyLearn’s Mission.

Take a look at the Mission Statement of FamilyLearn:

Our Mission

To help you strengthen and unify your family by inspiring and enabling you to preserve, search, share, and learn from life’s stories.

Our Values

We operate our company based on:

• Tender Lovin’ Customer Care
• Exponential Improvement
• Accountability
• Respect
• INtegrity

Our Team

We absolutely value each other and always enjoy a good laugh.

Our Vision

To be the world’s most enjoyed personal and family story library.

MemoryPress and pyxlin are actually just parts in the mission, and vision, of FamilyLearn. Every story and photo recorded into a book or journal is stored on servers in FamilyLearn’s database. This way 10, 20, or 50 years down the road you, your kids, or your grandkids, will be able to get online and search FamilyLearn for keywords.

For example, lets say my kids got online 20 years from now and made a search for “integrity”. FamilyLearn—kind of like Google but private and for your own family—would pull up my story of “integrity”, my mom’s story of “integrity”, my grandpa’s story of “integrity”, etc… And every other story of “integrity” in our family library!

We invite you to come and help build the world’s most enjoyed family library.

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I love to watch people’s eyes when they first see MemoryPress in action. I think that MemoryPress helps us realize some of the wonders, miracles really, of the Information Age. Who would have thought 10 years ago that it would become possible to collaborate with family members from all over the world to pull together cherished memories and then publish them into a beautiful hardbound book. The thought never even crossed my mind.

Today I got into a dialog with “Ol’ Myrt” from DearMYRTLE, Your Friend in Genealogy blog. I will be doing a Podcast with her tomorrow. She will be asking me a lot of questions for her listeners. Her podcast is growing and has between 300 and 500 regular listeners. I will keep you updated.

As Ol’ Myrtle reviewed our site she had some wonderful things to say:

this is an incredible website… thanks for sharing. The more I see about your site, the more I like it.

OK, I gave up – and LOVE your site. I am really getting excited, and HAD to share it with my readers.

Those are just the good parts of our conversation, after Ol’ Myrtle struggled with out blog RSS feed, links at the bottom of the page, and a few other things I so commonly overlook.

Here is the newletter that she sent to her subscribers! Thanks Ol’ Myrtle! Even though I have not met Ol’ Myrtle in person, I think we will be good friends.

UPDATE: 300 to 500 podcast listeners doesn’t include RSS Feeds through iTunes etc…

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Mashable (currently ranked 13 among blogs worldwide) wrote a little article called: “MemoryPress Lets You Create Online Scrapbooks” early this morning. It is great to be recognized, even if MemoryPress isn’t exactly an “Online Scrapbook”.

I am not a “scrapper”. A couple years ago I made the mistake of relating what is now MemoryPress to scrapbooking. My sister corrected me, “scrapbooking is about the little bits and pieces, the glue, and the cutting. The scraping part of it makes scrapbooking fun.” Here is Wikipedia on Scrapbooking:

“Making scrapbooks is a hobby relating to pasting newspaper clippings, magazine articles, photos, usually personal, or other memorabilia into custom-decorated albums, or scrapbooks.”

Online or digital scrapbooking makes little sense to me because it takes the “scrap” out of scrapbooking, leaving us with just booking.

MemoryPress is a typesetting system, like a user-friendly version of TeX, Adobe InDesign, or QuarkXpress. MemoryPress is built to help you professionally publish your personal or family history with ease and very little cost. Because it is web-based MemoryPress allows online collaboration with your family and friends.

A few days ago Max mentioned that we seem “obsessed” with book quality, and typesetting. I told Neal that I think this is great! Other than writing your personal or family history there are just a few things that really matter when you are publishing your personal or family history. Two of those things are: how professional your personal or family history is going to look (typesetting), and how long your personal or family history is going to last (your book binding).

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