A few weeks ago, I appeared on a morning talk show in Utah called Studio 5. They asked for a few genealogical basics to pop on their website and recently added them here:
Easy ways to get started with genealogy
On this show, I demonstrated Ancestry.com's "shaky leaf" system by poking into one of the host's roots. More than a million family trees and 400,000 photos have been uploaded just since July 2006 using this new functionality (see the press release for more details), and once you play with it, you'll discover why -- it's pretty darn addicting. In fact, one New York Times reporter described it as "digital crack."
If you'd like to try it, just enter some date or upload a GEDCOM into Ancestry.com's Member Trees. Here's wishing you many shaky leaves (and if that doesn't make sense to you now, it will once you give it a go)!