Cosworthlady
Well-known member
i heard a rumour too but no one can confirm.
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Loch Of The Lowes Osprey Webcam 2011 (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Cosworthlady
- Start date
i heard a rumour too but no one can confirm.
Tiger_mz
Well-known member
Well Lofty on the RSPB forum said he saw something on the nest but the picture was too poor to identify it.
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Cosworthlady
Well-known member
spoke to someone at The centre and there wasn't an osprey yesterday. However Ej has caught LG with their pants down today lol. Glad to see her back though. X
Tiger_mz
Well-known member
Pity we are not allowed to take captures!
Mad_BMS
Well-known member
Had not realised they were stopping us doing that as well Tiger but when I saw your comment remembered noticing the new copyright notice.
Anyway I am going up to Comrie next week and hope to get over to LoTL with my parents in tow again Ann would be nice if they were back or better still arived while we are there. Will be off line all week so will catch up on return.
what the hell is going on witht the place, are they trying to put people off as they certainly will with recent events
Hi, I'm Redfinch from Oklahoma. So glad I found this forum now that we can't post at the Center. I'm very disappointed about their new Blog. I enjoyed reading all the posts and looked forward to it every day.
Sincerely hope Lady will be back, but................. We shall wait and see
Sincerely hope Lady will be back, but................. We shall wait and see
Hi Redfinch and a warm welcome to BF on behalf of the Staff and Moderators.
I hope you soon settle down and make yourself at home here.
Where is she???
D
I hope you soon settle down and make yourself at home here.
Where is she???
D
I live an hour or so north of Edinburgh. It's a lovely city (that is if you like cities LOL).
Actually I'm not that far from Loch of the Lowes and do pop along there on occasion. I'm more inclined to go in the other direction where we see quite a few Ospreys coming in to fish.
D
Woop2y
Member
Loch of Lowes
Hallo everyone - also fed up with the SWT change and it is great to find you,
I was so angry I sent off an email to them - see response below. Very unhelpful but more or less a reply by return.
Dear Pat,
Thank you for your email. We appreciate your views regarding our decision to remove the commenting facility from our Loch of the Lowes blog. As you rightly point out, there are certainly benefits to running a wildlife blog on this scale, however management issues continued to challenge us as the blog continued to grow. It was a difficult decision for us to make, however with limited resources we are simply unable to sustain a moderation service for the high volumes of comments we receive. Unfortunately using volunteer moderators would also require high volumes of staff time and has been ruled out at this point in time.
We hope you enjoy watching our web cams and following the blog this season.
I have looked into the issue with the osprey mailbox, unfortunately there appears to be an issue and I have asked our IT department to action this today. Please accept my apologies for that.
Kind regards
Roxanne K King
Marketing and Business Development
Scottish Wildlife Trust
Hallo everyone - also fed up with the SWT change and it is great to find you,
I was so angry I sent off an email to them - see response below. Very unhelpful but more or less a reply by return.
Dear Pat,
Thank you for your email. We appreciate your views regarding our decision to remove the commenting facility from our Loch of the Lowes blog. As you rightly point out, there are certainly benefits to running a wildlife blog on this scale, however management issues continued to challenge us as the blog continued to grow. It was a difficult decision for us to make, however with limited resources we are simply unable to sustain a moderation service for the high volumes of comments we receive. Unfortunately using volunteer moderators would also require high volumes of staff time and has been ruled out at this point in time.
We hope you enjoy watching our web cams and following the blog this season.
I have looked into the issue with the osprey mailbox, unfortunately there appears to be an issue and I have asked our IT department to action this today. Please accept my apologies for that.
Kind regards
Roxanne K King
Marketing and Business Development
Scottish Wildlife Trust
Nightranger
Senior Moment
I am not really in on what has happened here below the surface but I suspect a lot of things have come to light out of innocent enthusiasm. I have worked with a wildlife trust and I know that their funds are not what we would hope they would be, which leads to:
1, It is essential that they control their own publicity and that includes the carefully considered timing to put out press releases. The RSPB does not have this problem because they operate over a wider base and they can command far more attention by say, an osprey story than we can generate by our private efforts. However, the wildlife trusts can easily be undermined by a forum post, a social network post or even a captured clip on YouTube...this leads to...
2, Copyright law is not really complicated but it is painfully subtle - anything on the Internet is assumed to be in the public domain but this has its limits. Film feeds are provided by a service and even though a straightforward link on Facebook will give all the relevant information, strictly speaking, it should still be officially sanctioned by the service provider. This is far from a trivial matter because information written on forums is placed on the service provider's facilities too and gleaning that information for a book without appropriate authorisation from the writers and providers is at best, unethical but at worst, illegal.
All this can be avoided by writing to the appropriate people and gathering permissions. Once this is gained, it does not matter whether all proceeds of a publication go to the charity of donations are made to the project because it is sanctioned. Unfortunately, the Internet has lulled into a false sense of security over copyright issues and I can see both sides of the argument.
I hope this is of some help to everyone involved in this debate and I thank one of my friends for telling me about this topic. Ospreys are super-cool and I wish I could see one on my local patch even though I have been to Loch Garten. Keep watching the skies (erm...webcams!).
1, It is essential that they control their own publicity and that includes the carefully considered timing to put out press releases. The RSPB does not have this problem because they operate over a wider base and they can command far more attention by say, an osprey story than we can generate by our private efforts. However, the wildlife trusts can easily be undermined by a forum post, a social network post or even a captured clip on YouTube...this leads to...
2, Copyright law is not really complicated but it is painfully subtle - anything on the Internet is assumed to be in the public domain but this has its limits. Film feeds are provided by a service and even though a straightforward link on Facebook will give all the relevant information, strictly speaking, it should still be officially sanctioned by the service provider. This is far from a trivial matter because information written on forums is placed on the service provider's facilities too and gleaning that information for a book without appropriate authorisation from the writers and providers is at best, unethical but at worst, illegal.
All this can be avoided by writing to the appropriate people and gathering permissions. Once this is gained, it does not matter whether all proceeds of a publication go to the charity of donations are made to the project because it is sanctioned. Unfortunately, the Internet has lulled into a false sense of security over copyright issues and I can see both sides of the argument.
I hope this is of some help to everyone involved in this debate and I thank one of my friends for telling me about this topic. Ospreys are super-cool and I wish I could see one on my local patch even though I have been to Loch Garten. Keep watching the skies (erm...webcams!).
Nightranger
Senior Moment
I have to say that having (briefly) been a moderator on a conservation organisation's forum that I understand this response. I found that I had not the time to actively moderate the forum and any issues I had would be put to other people too before I could be sure about say, removing a post. This begs the question as to whether volunteers could do this job? In my opinion, no because it would be impossible to give them all the appropriate briefings about policy that they would need to do this job. In reality, volunteer staff should know their area but by contrast, paid staff have other duties unless (and this is rare in coservation if not, unknown) they are specifically paid to look after online forums.
Cosworthlady
Well-known member
some of the people who volunteered were ex staff who moderated the blog for a job just days before. They knew the rules. It would have worked.
I also moderate the blog that Peter ferns the loch manager set up in December when swt stopped things abruptly. Most of us made it over to the new blog because email addresses and phone numbers had been swapped but there as so many nest cam fans that are in limbo somewhere.
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Cosworthlady
Well-known member
its our osprey watchers from overseas who Will miss out. None of the footage was sold for someones own profit. Even the book that swt printed on behalf of the bloggers was just the bloggers own material. Its an excellent book but they've dropped it. It made thousands and would have done so still if they'd still ordered more copies. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that i can't go into.
June Atkinson
Well-known member
Volunteer Moderators
I'm sure there are people whose experience as Moderators in other forums should be sufficient to convince the SWT.
I have moderated on three separate forums on a University website for ten years, have also been a member of RSPB for years, and am an active member of the Friends of Red Kites. I also manage two websites, so like other folk, am aware of the constraints imposed on posting in a public domain.
Clearly, criteria would have to be met, but I think this is still an avenue worth exploring.
June
I'm sure there are people whose experience as Moderators in other forums should be sufficient to convince the SWT.
I have moderated on three separate forums on a University website for ten years, have also been a member of RSPB for years, and am an active member of the Friends of Red Kites. I also manage two websites, so like other folk, am aware of the constraints imposed on posting in a public domain.
Clearly, criteria would have to be met, but I think this is still an avenue worth exploring.
June
Nightranger
Senior Moment
Ann, it is not just footage but stills too and it is not necessarily just about making financial profit from this kind of use. As I mentioned previously, the wildlife trusts need some control over what is put out and when because they have far fewer opportunities to generate their own publicity than the RSPB. You probably know about the specifics than I do in this case but I have seen postings in various places that were clearly grabbed from webcams despite not being a follower of the ospreys directly. There are a lot of subtleties over copyright law that are easy to forget even if no harm is intended. Incidentally, it is possible that SWT does not own the equipment used for the webcams although they are given rights of distribution. I know the RSPB uses third parties for some of their webcams and I can imagine this creates a further complication.
I cannot imagine what the issue is with the SWT book but I believe there is another publication either in print or in the planning. From what I have heard, there are some question marks about this book in terms of where its profit is going and I wonder if this is the root of the issues that have been discussed on this thread.
Nightranger
Senior Moment
I agree, this is not good and seems to have been poorly handled but again, there may be reasons that we do not know about.
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