Birdpost.com?
Birdpost.com? Yet another list to feed! So, what's it got that eBird hasn’t?
From the Crunchbase.com entry on the website:
Birdpost is poised to lead a burgeoning "citizen science" movement as a usable, innovative, and potent framework aimed at connecting nature and people in ways never before possible. Birdpost combines satellite mapping technology with the popular sport of birdwatching, dramatically modernizing, improving, and altering the hobby by solving birders’ most vexing problem: where to find new bird species. Birdpost gives the estimated 18 million serious U.S. birders an online platform to chronicle, organize, map, and share their collective birding activities.
The cumulative data gathered by Birdpost’s users will produce "natural histories" of local habitats and give conservationists, educators, and other nature enthusiasts the tools they need to better protect, understand, and the enjoy the environment. Ultimately, Birdpost’s proprietary vehicle for grass-roots nature reporting will scale beyond birds to include other nature verticals such as wildlife, insects, reptiles, plants, fish, and trees, becoming a human-generated nature search engine.
Who is going to confirm rare-bird or record early/late sightings at this website? Is the intent really for citizen science, like eBird? As more people use it, will useful sightings data be diverted away from eBird? Will any on-line reporting tool ever replace the simplicity and usefulness of the listservs? The "Friend Connector" on Birdpost.com makes it seem like a brand of FaceBook - social networking for birders. I appreciate that eBird is sponsored by Audubon, Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Science Foundation and see no such sponsorship or affiliation for Birdpost.com. Naturally, I think anything that gets people interested in birds, birding, and general nature observation can have positive educational merit, but hasn’t this website merely reinvented the wheel relative to eBird? Why would birders want to spend even more time at the keyboard entering sightings into yet another database?
Addendum:
Link: Birdpost - Watch the video
Slick marketing! Presently advertised to be free (sign-up), it's ultimately a for-profit service that will cost $50.00 for an annual subscription - they're going to sell your data. No thanks!
9 Comments:
Mike - great blog! Thanks for your great questions and comments. I'm glad we share in interest in advancing birding, the most compelling and fun hobby in the world. While we are aware of eBird and so many other great websites, we see Birdpost as a simpler, more attractive more fun way to find and list birds. We're not trying to compete with anyone in terms of bird "information" but are focused on finding, listing, and sharing. One thing we're excited about is to try to reach out to schools to help get kids get into birding in a way that's fun for them (I have six kids so I really want this to happen). Thanks again, and feel free to contact me anytime - Best, Jason Peery, Birdpost Co-Founder
Mike - FYI - we hope to keep it free as long as possible, but we're not going to apologize if we add more features and then make it a subscription service for those features. Ultimately, we did this to further birding, not to line our own pockets. We would think you'd be glad for a service like ours. Oh well. Best to you!
I'm sure you'll do well!
Mike M.
Just a quick note- I have been alerted to the fact that birdpost.com has been pirating photos...my photo of a Crescent-chested Warbler was used without permission, and several other people (Glen Tepke, Ian Davies, Brian Patteson) have had photos used on this website without their consent. For me, it's not a big deal, but I know some other people have been pretty upset about it.
Luke- I think it is a big deal if they used your photo(s) without permission. Besides an example of plain bad manners, this is illegal- your work is copyrighted whether you state it or not. If they are serious about getting this off the ground, they need to get serious about asking photographers' permissions, paying for photos (even for folks who do this as a hobby, equipment & travel ain't free & this is a commercial endeavor), and in my opinion, crediting photographers for their work.
I'm always very happy to grant free permission to use my photos for things like talks to local birding & nature groups, teachers'/students' projects, artists looking for reference photos, when friends need them for a project, etc. (I typically get several such requests every week.) But when the folks asking for pics have a budget, are themselves getting paid for the project, and/or if the pics are being used for commercial purposes, then I think it is only fair for them to compensate the photographer, even if they can only afford modest compensation.
Mike- you might want to browse through the pics at Birdpost to see if they snagged any of yours- those of us who post pics on the web seem to have been considered fair game to poach without asking.
That's MY LeConte's Sparrow on BirdPost. And no, they didn't ask permission from me, although Wikipedia states that photos we provide them with are not to be used without attribution and not for profit without permission.
It's just bad form.
I didn't find any of my bird images there.
Thanks,
Mike M.
Birdpost has a rampant problem with RIPPING OFF COPYRIGHTED PHOTOS!
They need to be sued out of existence, for the good of REAL citizen-science.
Fellow readers - regarding photos, the moment we realized we had an issue with copyrighted photos on the site, we took them out -- and I mean we deleted all non-wikipedia photos out of the site/database and started over. We would never intentionally put copyrighted photos on the site - ever. We took immediate and massive action and hope to be a standard-bearer in this regard. We just didn't have good processes in place to monitor all of the people (people we hired and users) who were submitting photos. We think we have a good handle on it now and thank those of you who have given us the benefit of the doubt. If you didn't, I understand.
Regarding comments about the "non-profit" ebird vs. Birdpost, we paid a lot of money out of our own pockets to build the site to promote birding, so if we find a way to make it back, I don't think it's unreasonable. I wish eBird and all birding websites the best, because we all want to help move birding forward. Best to all -- Jason Peery.
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