footie's blog

Genes Reunited - the latest service from the people behind FriendsReunited - is fast becoming my favourite site for making contact with distant rellies and other family tree nuts.

Unlike other sites with a more local focus - like the Channel Islands Surnames List, it does not divulge anyone's email address. It also lets you include details of your family tree, which you can choose to share with others. Unlike other similar sites - like Rootsweb's Worldconnect - you choose which other users you give access to your tree.

Following my earlier comments, I have now had an official response from the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography team informing me that :

"According to the list I have Oxfordshire County Council and Reading Libraries have made purchases of the ODNB.

We appreciate that a number of individual readers would welcome either CD Rom or pay-as-you go service. We will be testing the water over the next few months and reviewing how to proceed and will take customers' feedback into account when doing so."

I've just discovered a great facility at the AT&T Research site. It is a Text-to-speech Interactive Demo - you simply type in a sentence, select the voice you would like to speak it - and press enter. Within a few seconds it "speaks" the sentence by creating a WAV file.