A couple of further comments of a general nature which I hope Simon and
others who run useful sites here will not take badly :-) I must confess that
whilst I have looked at (but not contributed to) Wildiaries and Flickr I
have never looked at Twitter or Facebook so that makes me extremely well
qualified to comment?
To a certain extent this is a classic case of the small company versus the
large one. The small sites tend to be very responsive to requests for
changes. I know that the owners of both Eremaea and Birdpedia (which has not
really been included in the posts I have looked at but is another very
useful site) have been very helpful when I have wanted to interface with
them both for my own now-defunct site and for the BOCA site. I suspect that
such a level of co-operation and willingness to modify their sites would not
be forthcoming from the "big boys". This of course is primarily because all
these small sites are being run (I suspect) mainly as a hobby and a service
to the birding community - whereas the "big boys" run their sites to make
money.
This raises the second point - successful big sites are likely to continue
for as long as they make money - and when they stop making money (or fail to
start making money) are likely to disappear - there have been many examples
of this over the brief life of the Internet and there will be many more in
future. "Hobby" sites (and please do not take this as derogatory term) are
likely to be run for as long as the owner has an interest and/or is capable
of supporting the site. Hopefully the owners of such sites have some plans
as to what will happen when this is no longer the case - I know that at
least one of them has - otherwise we stand to lose as a birding community an
awful lot of data when the inevitable happens. (Remember birders that whilst
it is great to share your sightings, trip reports, photos etc. with others
online, do not rely on such systems to hold your only copy of such
information!)
I guess the "best" option is the sites that are run by organisations such as
BA and BOCA (vested interest in the latter one I must confess!) - these
organisations have so far lasted a very long time and thus are less likely
to disappear than either the "hobby" sites or the big commercial sites. But
equally - with the exception of the Atlas/Birdata - they are probably not so
innovative as the others!
2009/11/7 Simon Mustoe <>
>
> Chris,
>
> Wildiaries does all this. It is not as refined as Flickr, yet, but we're
> working on refining the image management and location user interface at the
> moment. The benefit over Flickr is that the site is devoted to wildlife and
> conservation and that we are tailoring it to your needs. In response to your
> points:
>
> <>
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