I don't think that's ever going to be possible (see Brexit etc.....)After having travelled a bit around Europe, I think I would be willing to pay money for a unified service aggregating the incredibly fractured local information, if it were real-time, reliable to include everything and configurable - optimally I would be able to just enter a list of birds I already have and thus not care about and to select an area of interest. The best would be something like several areas for different levels of rarities (I'd go further for something more rare) - key thing would be the ability to change this quickly when travelling. Because at the moment, there are so many sources to check, a lot of them only in obscure languages (such as French )
It would be possible if "everyone" would use reporting websites, but this is another fractured landscape.After having travelled a bit around Europe, I think I would be willing to pay money for a unified service aggregating the incredibly fractured local information, if it were real-time, reliable to include everything and configurable - optimally I would be able to just enter a list of birds I already have and thus not care about and to select an area of interest. The best would be something like several areas for different levels of rarities (I'd go further for something more rare) - key thing would be the ability to change this quickly when travelling. Because at the moment, there are so many sources to check, a lot of them only in obscure languages (such as French )
I imagine the extra complication here might also be if each of the three regions you are near not only have different reporting services, but services that use completely different media. It's not too hard to subscribe to multiple listserves and have them email you reports. It gets more difficult when one region is listserve, another reason uses facebook, and yet another area uses discord or something.I don't think that's ever going to be possible (see Brexit etc.....)
As someone living close to the three counties boundary (Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire) who therefore prefers birds five miles away in Surrey to those 60 miles or so away in Southampton (but still in my home county of Hampshire) I understand how living close to a European national border could create a similar issue but surely it's never going to be about more than two or three close countries including your own?
For European listing you'll just have to deal with one country at a time, make use of Google translate and commit to your own and maybe one other rarity alert system permanently.
Mind you, excluding our rump collection of suppressors, Britain's reporting is pretty good, so I can afford to think like that.
John
Well why not start an organization or club with this aim in mind?Yeah, things could generally be easy if people cooperated, that is a very general truth In the absence of that, I'd happily pay someone to go through the fractured sources for me. I am generally quite the money hoarder and don't like paying for stuff I don't need, but this would be real work making my life more pleasant. But there are probably too few people to make this economical, the vast majority of people I know who list do just their country and so don't care about what's elsewhere.
Not at all. Glad to have you, more than welcome, hope you do pull a visit off some day.I think that at this scale, this is a full time job, maybe several of those. I simply don't have anywhere near the energy to do this. That's why i am saying that I'd pay for it.
Yes I joined your group, since it seems to have most of the rarity information - or should the fact that I am not happy with the appearance of more and more different platform stop from joining them when it's useful? At least it's in English
Well the difference would be that you don't need to meet outputs/deadlines, you simply need to demonstrate that it's existence is useful and functional.I was in Ireland only once so far, in 2016 for a conference - during which I twitched the Glacuous-winged Gull, which was my first signifciant WP twitch and yet it remains very likely the rarest bird on my WP list. So one can say that Ireland is even somewhat responsible for me becoming the rabid twitcher I am I was considering coming recently but we had limited time due to various medical appointments and there were no flights on the correct days ....
I mean in sounds easy, I am just not very good for this job. I am, ironically, a project manager at work nowadays, and everyone involved could atest that it us not going that well
Indeed, Jan is correct. Think about how many mainstream tv and newspaper news networks report news from other services around the world, even taking screenshots of people's feeds etc (notable for the dodgier politicians etc who often delete stuff that's embarrassing).I don't know about UK, but in most if Europe I am pretty sure you can't own facts. You can claim IP rights to things you created, but you can't do so with the truth, ironically. In case of news, you can still own IP over article wording etc., but definitely not over the information itself.
You understand, of course, that paid services take news A. From each other...all the time, and B. From every single public source they can find, including Twitter, Facebook and eBird.If I recall ten years ago or so there was a free Twitter based UK bird news service. It was basically someone who was subscribed to one or both of the paid-for UK services and was posting the information in their alerts. While this maybe legal, it is hardly playing with a straight bat. The Twitter feed didn't last long, whether it was pressure from the news services or that the poster just got bored who knows.
Any Europe-wide bird news aggregation service that sourced its data from the paid-for services might be legal on paper but I can't imagine the news services taking it for long.
Actually...I find this really strange. Birdforum's own rare bird news sub forum posts each major rarity in the UK or Ireland and invariably someone responds with the details in moments, more often than not someone posts a link to a tweet, showing that info was public domain to begin with.If I recall ten years ago or so there was a free Twitter based UK bird news service. It was basically someone who was subscribed to one or both of the paid-for UK services and was posting the information in their alerts. While this maybe legal, it is hardly playing with a straight bat. The Twitter feed didn't last long, whether it was pressure from the news services or that the poster just got bored who knows.
Any Europe-wide bird news aggregation service that sourced its data from the paid-for services might be legal on paper but I can't imagine the news services taking it for long.