AitorGarcia.net

Some days ago my French friends that live in the dorm were surprised that I didn’t know about radio.blog.club, according to them is just as popular as YouTube, at least in France.

I had previously tried GoEar and last.fm, but neither of the two services convinced me at all. Radio.blog.club is very simple to use, you type the name of the song or artist, a list of results appears and you just have to select the song you want to hear. Then when the song finishes, another random song similar to the one previously heard will be played, so it’s a very nice service to find new artists that fit with your musical preferences.

After registering you’re allowed to create playlists with your favorite music and embed them in your website. Of course everything for free, so I think that the website may not be very legal, but the French told me that they think it is because you can’t download the songs, and if you want to download them you have to pay, just like in iTunes.

Geni is a social-networking website for families to explore their geneology. In other words it’s a website similar to Facebook, Orkut or hi5 but family-oriented. I found out about Geni.com some months ago but at first I thought it was not worth to try it out. Two or three weeks ago I decided to register and start building my own family tree, it’s very easy and intuitive. However I realized I had forgotten the names of most of my great-grandparents, but the thing that makes Geni special is that it uses the contact information that you include to invite members of your family to start contributing to build the same family tree. So I just had to include my father’s e-mail, teach him the basics and right now I have a family tree of 77 members and now I know that the great-grandparents of the great-grandparent of my great-granparent were called Miguel Polanco (who died in 1778) and Ana María Gutierrez (who died in 1775). Cool!

My genealogic tree

The next step is teaching my cousins and my uncles how to use it so they can start growing our family tree. Maybe in the future we’ll have built a gigantic family tree. I have read some stories in blogs about people with more than one thousand people in their family tree, and about people that has found out that they are related to famous people and they didn’t know about it.

If you have 10 minutes take a look at Geni.com and start building your own family tree, because I’m pretty sure it will get popular in the future, and it’s just going to get better because the company has raised more than $10 million from venture capital firms.