Hi,
This is a quick post about Wildiaries. To placate those who may be
concerned about posting 'commercial information', this post is not directed at
any commercial activity. Wildiaries was designed to be available as a 'free'
system for community
use and is a tool that can add value to the work of interest groups and
individuals. Read on for further clarification.
We are not going to make a habit of posting messages like this to
birding-aus but this is a particularly momentous occasion, as we've
just made the move from Beta to full working version. From conversations with
others, it's clear that we have not taken the time to explain what Wildiaries
actually is and what our intentions are.
RECENT UPDATES
Here are a few of the more significant recent changes to Wildiaries:
You can now enter named locations and re-use these. You can now view photos
as a slideshow. The creation of trip reports has been stream-lined. You can
share reports with one-click by email or to social-networking sites. You can
bulk upload photos and then move these between different pages in your trip
reports. Clustered google map pins. The look and feel has been improved
again.
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Wildiaries was designed by naturalists for naturalists and we are very
grateful to all those on birding-aus who have used it and taken the
time to provide critical feedback. It is the only system like it in the
world. No other system allows you to:
1. Collate and manage ALL your wildlife experiences (not just birds);
2. Manage and maintain your own data YOURSELF (your data is always
maintained by you, as opposed to being sent to someone else as
custodian - this way, you can continually improve, enhance or correct
your information. You can get value from it by placing it within your
website*(see below)
Take a moment to sign up and have a play. Any questions, we will be
happy to walk people through it. We're about to roll out the ability
for users to customise their page look and feel, thereby enabling
Wildiaries to be used as an integral part of people's blogs and
websites. Sign up for a Wildiaries account and we'll send through
updates when this comes available.
With Wildiaries, you can collate trip reports of all your wildlife
sightings (not just birds). You use the one account to join multiple
sites and share your trip across these. You can also collaborate with
your birding colleagues on trip report creation. Here's a list of the
current sites you can join:
http://home.wildiaries.com/2010/03/15/choose-a-site-then-sign-up-and-begin/.
Check some of the reports by Jack Moorhead for an example of how
flexible the system is:
http://aussiebirding.wildiaries.com/users/73-Jack-M
ABOUT WILDIARIES
Wildiaries is online software for managing wildlife experiences (do not
confuse Wildiaries with Bird-O). Many of the components of Bird-O use
Wildiaries as the 'engine'. Wildiaries however, can be used as an
engine for any group or individual's website. Developing, maintaining
and managing a sophisticated system to store and manage this type of
content is enormously costly and time-consuming. We designed Wildiaries
as a service because this opportunity is otherwise out of the reach of
most community groups and individuals. In its standard format, there is
NO CHARGE for using Wildiaries. We are proud that we've managed to
create something that will support the natural history community and existing
websites (see below).
*Wildiaries data is readily made
available to other website custodians. As yet we have been too busy to
pursue
this important function.
However, in general, it is very very simple to feed data to anyone who
wants it as "XML". The
advantage of Wildiaries over traditional 'gate-keeper' models of data
collection, is that the data is owned, maintained, continuously
improved and managed by the individual and their colleagues. It offers
a far higher level of quality assurance over time as it is continuously
seen and commented on. Being held by the
owner means the owner gets the value from it and doesn't have to
duplicate effort by putting data in their own website and then
separately, uploading it to someone else. The advantage for data
custodians is in gathering much larger amounts of data. It is a fact
that most people don't have the time to put information in twice and
that given the choice, they will put it in their site first. This means
that national sightings databases are
not getting all the data they could. As more and more naturalists and
local groups get their own websites, and people become more and more
time precious, more data will be lost unless we can offer people a tool
to use, and pool the resulting knowledge. Wildiaries has been very
carefully designed. Using Wildiaries will help future-proof the
hard work put into the traditional websites that are currently
online.
In short - PEOPLE DON'T NEED TO SIGN UP TO MULTIPLE SITES, THEY ONLY
NEED TO ENTER THEIR DATA ONCE, AND THEY UPLOAD DATA TO THEIR OWN PAGE.
THEN, DATA CAN BE CENTRALLY POOLED FROM EVERY WILDIARIES SITE AND PAGE
USED BY ANYONE ANYWHERE AND PROVIDED TO SOMEONE WHO NEEDS THIS DATA.
Note, right now, we can create bird sites for any region of any country in the
world (and
can quite easily do this for any other group, given a list of species).
For instance, we've just made an Argentina site for an Aussie birder
and there will be an article about Tierra del Fuego appearing on
http://www.bird-o.com soon. On request, we've also just created a Victorian
orchids sites, a site on marine fauna (including fish) of Port Douglas, and
Ground Beetles of the UK!
Next week, there will be some further updates, including:
the option to customise ALL the pages that belong to you. This
way, you can start using Wildiaries as your own customised trip diary
system to match the design of your website or blog. An RSS feed of your latest
trips from one or all of the
Wildiaries sites you are signed up to (we will provide instructions on
how to get these into your website using Feedburner).
The option to get a completely customised site of your own, optionally with
ads removed.
Regards,
Simon Mustoe.
_________________________________________________________________
http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/195013117/direct/01/
==============================www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
=============================
|
