Why WorldVitalRecords.com instead of Ancestry.com?

I frequently field questions from members of WorldVitalRecords.com as well as people who are considering purchasing a membership. This is an email that I got from Lee, an individual that is curious about WorldVitalRecords.com.

---

David,

I've been a member of Ancestry.com for about 10 years. I have found a lot of information there that has furthered my research. I don't see anything about census records. Do you have them, like Ancestry.com ? If I upload my Ged file are you going to end up selling my work and still charge me? How accurate are your family files? What percentage of entries come with source's?

Please tell me why I should switch.

Thank you,
Lee

---

Dear Lee,

You ask some very good questions. There are lots of answers, but let me give you a few reasons.
We are very quick to tell everyone that WorldVitalRecords.com doesn't have as many databases as Ancestry.com. Ancestry has a 10 year head start on us. We are growing rapidly, but we are still smaller than they are. We have great exclusive content on our site that they don't have on theirs, and vice versa.

Ancestry has great content. I have a great respect for their content. When I worked there I was responsible for putting over 1 billion records on line. Another of our employees, John Ivie, put 3 billion records online on their site when he worked there. I can't say anything bad about their content. The have the best collection in the industry.

However, we try to be a lower cost alternative for those who can't afford the more expensive memberships at Ancestry. Some of our members have told us that they have subscribed to us specifically because they could no longer afford to be an Ancestry member. I am glad that we are able to provide our site for people who can't afford Ancestry.

We are putting price pressures into the online genealogy space, and I am frequently notified when Ancestry lowers their cost or adds new features to respond to what we are doing. As a businessman I know that increased competition improves the products for all in the industry. Everyone benefits, even if they are not a member of WorldVitalRecords.com

We have some census records and are in negotiations to get a lot more. Despite our small census collection, we are ranked by Alexa as the Number 1 Genealogy Census Site. We are the 3rd most popular Genealogy Database site. We are the 14th most popular of all genealogy sites.

We are adding at least 1 new database a day, in reality it is between 5 and 10 a day. On March 1st alone, we released over 100 databases. We have great content partners that want their content on our site. In fact, we have more than one partner that want their content on our site because we "are not Ancestry."

We have a series of announcements over the next month or so that will put us on the map as one of the major players in the Genealogy space. We have some announcements that will change the Genealogy and Family History industry. You should sign up for our free weekly newsletter so that you can be aware of our exciting announcements.

We also try to be innovative and provide new functionality and features on our site that are not available at Ancestry or anywhere else: Geo Mapping, Google Books, Country Specific Search Engines, Double Metaphone searching, and much more.

Thanks for your interest and I hope that you will consider a membership at WorldVitalRecords.com.

Sincerly,

David Lifferth
President, WorldVitalRecords.com

Folio Corp's Information Democracy video ca.1993

I worked at Folio Corporation from 1990-1994, just a few months shy of 5 years. I started work there while I was still going to BYU. Much of my professional career has been influenced by my work at Folio Corp.

We had the slightly audacious slogan "we don't want to change your oil, we want to change the world." This was a play on the Jiffy Lube campaign at that time that said the opposite: "We don't want to change the world, we just want to change your oil."

Folio, in the late 1980's and 1990's created information sharing technology that has never been equaled. At that time their products were DOS, Windows, Mac, local network, CD, and floppy disk based. When the internet began to attract its first significant use base, Folio released a very weak attempt to migrate their technology to the web. Folio has been bought and sold several times and has lost all of the passion and spirit that many of us had in the 1990's.

The internet has exceeded Folio's reach and made information readily available to almost anyone world wide. However, there are still significant features that Folio had pioneered ten to twenty years ago that you still can't do and probably never will be able to do on the internet.

The following video was prepared for the 1993 Folio Industry Conference. We would hold these annual events in the early days at Snowbird, Little America, and later at the San Diego Convention center to hold the thousands of participants.

James Earl Jones, the famous African-American actor, narrated the video. He filmed this for us when he was in Utah filming the movie "Sand Lot." Many people know him as the voice of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. He played a significant role in the civil rights
movement in the 1960s and is one of my favorite actors. I think that I first saw him as a child in "Roots" the epic African-American genealogy mini-series written by Alex Haley.

At Folio, I shared an office with Kevin Wade. He and Mark Allen where the primary developers of this "Information Democracy" video. It demonstrates the urgency and passion that we all had about making information available to the world.

As the video describes, information tore down the "iron curtain." Information overthrew dictators. Information is the strongest liberating weapon for oppressed people.

This video is 14 years old and yet it still brings tears to my eyes every time I see it.

I had family members who were oppressed and lived behind the iron curtain. When the Berlin Wall was torn down as documented in the video, my relatives came to visit us in America. They thanked us, the US, for our role in freeing and democratizing Eastern Europe.

The video was recently released to former employees at a Folio employee reunion held at Thanksgiving point a couple of years ago. I was thrilled to get a DVD of the video. I found the video again while preparing a DVD for Zack Durant's upcoming Eagle Court of Honor.

I hope that you enjoy the video as much as I do.

FinancialTimes: Microsoft attacks Google on copyright

Financial Times FT.com
COMPANIES
Media & internet


Microsoft attacks Google on copyright
By John Gapper in New York
Published: March 5 2007 22:08 Last updated: March 6 2007 00:19
Microsoft on Tuesday launches a fierce attack on Google over its “cavalier” approach to copyright, accusing the internet company of exploiting books, music, films and television programmes without permission.
Tom Rubin, associate general counsel for Microsoft, will say in a speech in New York that while authors and publishers find it hard to cover costs, “companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the back of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising and initial public offerings”.
Mr Rubin’s remarks, presaged in an article in Tuesday’s Financial Times, come as Google faces criticism and legal pressure from media companies over services allowing users to search online for books, films, television programmes and news. Viacom, the US media group, instructed YouTube, which Google owns, to remove 100,000 clips of copyright material.
The Authors Guild and a group of publishers backed by the Association of American Publishers have separately sued Google for making digital copies of copyrighted books from libraries without permission.
Mr Rubin will tell the AAP’s annual meeting that Google’s decision to take digital copies of all books in various library collections, unless publishers tell it not to, “systematically violates copyright, deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetising their works and, in doing so, undermines incentives to create”.
He will say Google is breaching copyright law because it has “bestowed upon itself the unilateral right to make entire copies of copyrighted books”. Google thinks it is acting legally because it publishes only “snippets” of copyrighted works unless it has the publisher’s permission.
But Mr Rubin will say in Tuesday’s speech: “Google is saying to you and other copyright owners: ‘Trust us, you’re protected. We’ll keep the digital copies secure. We’ll only show snippets. We won’t harm you, we’ll promote you’.
“But . . . anyone who visits YouTube . . . will immediately recognise that it follows a similar cavalier approach to copyright.”
Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from Google by portraying itself as more sympathetic to copyright holders than Google, and has sent a letter to executives of big media conglomerates, offering to work with them to eliminate piracy from Soapbox, a new video service on MSN.
Patricia Schroeder, AAP president, said it had agreed to work with Microsoft and others to develop principles on responsible book search.
Google said it believed it was acting legally and ethically in providing snippets of in-copyright books and added that it removed books promptly when contacted by publishers. It said it generated more than $3.3bn of advertising revenues for other internet sites last year, which showed that it did not simply exploit the content of others.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

"FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. Privacy policy Terms© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2007.

WorldVitalRecords.com ranks very high on MSN

We, at http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/, track our search engine rankings very closely.

Paul B. Allen has convinced us that every employee is not only tied the bottom line for revenue, but also tied directly to our Search Engine Rankings. Using SEO (Search Engine Optimizations) we carefully construct each page on our web site so that it earns the highest possible ranking on the primary search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN).

As part of our recently released Country Specific Genealogy Search Engines, we optimized each of those pages as well. These pages are listed on our International Pages: www.worldvitalrecords.com/InternationalPages.aspx.

The efforts have paid off. While we typically talk about our rankings on Google, because they are #1, we our very proud of our MSN rankings. We are first in 8 of the searches, and very high on all of them! Below are our rankings for each of the searches in quotes.

#6 Argentina genealogy
#8 Australia genealogy
#2 Brazil genealogy
#2 Austria genealogy
#1 China Genealogy
#1 Chile genealogy
#4 Denmark genealogy
#10 England genealogy
#2 France genealogy
#3 Germany genealogy
#3 Hungary genealogy
#3 India genealogy
#13 Ireland genealogy
#3 Italy genealogy
#2 Japan genealogy
#1 Kenya genealogy
#10 Ontario Canada genealogy
#6 Newfoundland Canada genealogy
#1 Philippines genealogy
#5 Poland genealogy
#1 Portugal genealogy
#2 Russia genealogy
#25 Scotland genealogy
#5 Slovakia genealogy
#4 South Africa genealogy
#7 Sweden genealogy
#1 Tonga genealogy
#1 Turkey genealogy
#2 Ukraine genealogy
#1 Vietnam genealogy
#11 Wales genealogy