I’m not the world’s best gift giver when it comes to purchasing things for others. So I try to give gifts that aren’t physical things, but experiences. So this year I decided to create a website for my family (powered by tumblr) and invited my extended family to be authors. If you’re interested, it’s here. 

The social internet creates a bit of a problem. Your profile is all about you, the individual (granted, Facebook has “groups”). We’d go on a family vacation and the digital photos would remain on the computers of the people who took those photos. They’d share some on Facebook (although I don’t because Facebook is in my opinion painfully ugly), but there wasn’t a single, dedicated, beautifully designed place on the internet for The Parkinson Family to call our own. 

So I made one. And now my whole family is scanning in old pics of our great grandparents, pics of us as children, writing old family stories, and embedding YouTube videos of my grandfather telling stories, etc..

And since Tumblr makes multi-author blogging so easy, much of my family can do it (except gramps). The only problem is…damn these photos are embarrassing (that’s me in 1986).