Another major announcement about Macs, and kind of a follow-up to yesterday’s announcements. Again, from MG - Virtualization for Mac OS X - basically it’s a way to run Windows inside of Mac OS X at “near-native” speeds, so that one doesn’t have to reboot into Windows.

What this means, is for diehards like me, I can use the new Macs, but keep my collection of Windows genealogy software that I am still hanging onto, and easily run them whenever I need to.

This caught me off guard - a story at MacGenealogy.org about Apple releasing a utility that would allow people who buy the new Macs (that have Intel CPUs) to boot both Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X. Not at the same time, mind you, and not like VirtualPC where you have Windows running slugishly under Mac OS X in its own environment.

I’ve been a Mac user for a while. Genealogy is the one area that I never fully “switched”. I had too much data in Windows-based genealogy programs, and at the time there wasn’t much in the way of Mac genealogy software (there was kind of a low-point a few years back where only a few companies/individuals kept things going on the Mac genealogy front). My solution was to both keep a PC around, as well as VirtualPC (which, in my mind is basically a Windows emulator, it allows you to run Windows, and thus Windows applications, under Mac OS).

Things have changed big-time in the Mac community, especially the Mac genealogy community. There appear to be ten or eleven active Mac genealogy applications, both from companies and individuals, including several free ones. Last year, Steve Jobs announced that Macs are moving to Intel, and that Mac OS X was available for Intel Macs (or MacIntels or whatever you want to call them).

I see that Clooz 2.0 is undergoing beta testing. Clooz is billed as a “electronic filing cabinet that assists you with search and retrieval of important facts you have found during the ancestor hunt” by its developers, and they’ve certainly added a few interesting things.

Three things about this new version of Clooz jumped out at me (and they certainly helped me decide to add this to my collection of genealogy software)

The Internet Genealogy Community Study and its blog are back in action, starting up this week (monday to be precise).

Kylie Veale and her site, are, in her words, An Australian ‘Internet Studies’ PhD student researching online genealogy within the broader context of hobbyist Internet usage. How do genealogists use the Internet? What are the consequences of the development of genealogy as a significant Internet-based activity?

She has now published a “rolling draft” of her Thesis Outline, located here, where she breaks everything out (what else would an outline be?). It’s very interesting that while genealogy has spawned more than a few degrees, this is one of the few, if not the only, degree/thesis based around the study of genealogists themselves, and how they use the internet.

It’s a great premise, after all, the two most revolutionary things to occur in genealogy in our lifetimes have been the advent of personal computers and access to the internet.

I saw over at Legacy News that the Philadelphia Passenger Lists from 1800-1945 are now online and easily accessed at Ancestry.com. These are passenger lists from the National Archives and Records Administration. A fairly significant genealogy resource if you are having trouble finding where your ancestors came in at, and the usual suspects don’t turn up anything (NY, Boston, New Orleans, etc.).

According to an article from The Daily Telegraph from a few weeks back, 1837Online.com may go up for sale. There’s been a few high profile genealogy sites and software go up for sale in recent years. I didn’t realize that 1837Online.com was a much older business (well, relatively speaking, it was started in the 1960s) and it didn’t start out as a normal genealogy research company (although genealogy was central).

Schelly Talalay Dardashti has an article in Ynetnews, Cutting-edge genealogy: A genealogy about-face as savvy people change the way we research our families, about how genealogy research is being changed and updated to take advantage of the latest and greatest in computer technolgoy. It’s mainly about MyHeritage.com - a genealogy site devoted to facial recognition for genealogists. One of the most interesting of the new technologies that are or will be soon be, at genealogists’ disposal.

If you are curious at just what it takes to digitize over a million books, TechReview.com has an article by Kate Greene that you may want to read. It mentions the two major scanning projects going on - Google’s cooperative efforts with Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and the New York Public Library, and the Million Book Project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. While Google is secretive about how they are doing, the article discusses the Million Book Project’s efforts and resources.