Looking at all this activity made me think a little about how I plan trips myself and what's really useful to me, as an independent traveller. When I research places to go I'm interested in (a) where the hot spots are, and (b) what the species will be and (c) when I stand the best chances of seeing what I want. Lastly, I'm interested in the practicalities of where to stay and if there's a particularly good local guide I might want to hook up with. Essentially, I'm looking for information that in the UK or somewhere similar might be found in a 'where to what birds in...' type of thing, and I suspect that's fairly typical - I need a minute by minute account of seeing bird A followed by bird B, but Joe missing bird C far less (which is also the most tedious bit to write too, I should think!). And I find that out here in TZ, using trip reports for anywhere beyond the two standard routes (Southern / Eastern forests and nothern circuit) gets you nowhere, as everyone goes to the same place - or at least you have to search through dozens of reports before you find one that did something even slightly different. So, whilst I'm pleased to see the travelling birder site is available again, I'm wondering if there's enough interest here on BF to collate site information much better?
Opus already has country and site information for some places, but it's very thin - Tanzania has only one site (Serengeti National Park - I did some work on this site description, so it might be a bit useful now - it's far from complete, but does give some idea of how even a little effort - much less than a trip report requires - can provide something that I can't see anywhere else on the internet). Despite this they're already rather heaviliy visited pages - over 3600 hits to the Serengeti Park page. If there were enough people willing to put some effort in, it would be easy to extract some information from the top of trip reports on sites visited and start to collate this information. I don't think there's a similar resource anywhere I know of, and I think there's be quite a lot of value - especially if you want to break out of the standard routes. If there's enough interest I'll start on the bits of TZ I know best, others can do more elsewhere!
What do you think? Is this a niche within BF that could usefully be expanded -will people use it? Will they contribute?!
BTW the proporton of people who obviously use these resources but clearly haven't submitted any reports themselves (or they'd know how it works) is a little sad - come on everyone, share your experiences!
I have added my reports to Bird Forum trip reports, also to OSME for example, but given each submission to each site takes time, then obviously most persons are not going to trawl the internet and add to sites ever after. 
