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Facebook and Twitter for birders (1 Viewer)

Birding Peru

Well-known member
Since 9 months I have been experimenting with Social Media to connect with birders all over the world. I am overwhelmed about the possibilities these tools can bring birders. Nevertheless, I am missing many of the people from Bird Forum on Facebook and Twitter. I think there is a general fear of new technology because everything is happening so fast. Just as I am getting used with the two mentioned social media applications, there are new other ones..to hurdle....FriendFeed, Delicious, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn...
So for those of you on BirdForum who are where I was 9 months ago, I have put together two manuals on my blog.

I hope you find them useful. I have had very good responses so far. (just pass the cursor over the titles below - and "click" for the link!)

Facebook for birders. A beginner's guide.


Twitter for birders. Part 1. An introduction.


There is a third part - the second part of Twitter for birders in
production... Let me know if I should post it when done.

Please leave comments if you find this info useful or if there is anything that should have been mentioned that is not there.

Saludos

Gunnar Engblom
Kolibri Expeditions
Lima, Peru
 
Observado.org

I think there is a general fear of new technology because everything is happening so fast.

You can not be come member of everything everywhere. I started for a dutch website also a group for birders on a social network to see the faces behind the names. Their international counterpart also has a group on facebook. But I think most birders are looking for birds...and not for other birders. And that is why they are not on social networks.

I do not use Twitter, will take a look at your link but think it is not userfull for me at this moment. But I hope you do someone else a favour with it. I know 2 people active on Twitter, one is more active then the other but I think that both of them give not relevant info for me.
 
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I think there are a few bird groups on Facebook...but like like Optilete, I simply cannot be everywhere. I spend time on Facebook but with family etc.... just one of those things, you pick your battles...
 
Facebook and Twitter

a group for birders on a social network to see the faces behind the names.
I do not use Twitter, will take a look at your link but think it is not userfull for me at this moment.

Obviously for my business it is great to put a face to a name, but also as follow-up after the trip sharing fotos and so forth.
As for Twitter....you wait and see. There are few birders on twitter right not, but in my follow-up blog - part 2 - I will deal with how Twitter can practically make present rare bird alerts redundant. More to come!

Saludos

Gunnar Engblom
Kolibri Expeditions
 
Second part of Twitter for Birders.....Now it is getting interesting. Save up to some 300£ per year for a free RARE BIRD ALERT (I think I just made a few enemies, but many more friends!!)
http://www.kolibriexpeditions.com/birdingperu/blog/index.php/twitter-for-birders-part-2-rare-bird-alerts-with-twitter/

I can help you to set it up, tell all your friends to read the article...and let me know what to help you with. You find my email in my profile on the blog page.

Saludos

Gunnar

Hi, this is already up and running and has been for a few months;

http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=133428&highlight=twitter


Search twitter for #rarevine for all the latest news
Thanks
 
Markus,

That is great. I had no idea......
Nevertheless, have a look at my approach. You don't need to be connected by the page twitter.com/rarevine and James Spencer does not have to worry about the 38 people he follow all of a sudden start sending stuff without relevance about birds. I think you have figured this out by now, as you are using the hashtags, which is really the key to it all. The thing is that the birders don't have to restrict their tweets just about rare birds and people that are following each other do so because they actually like to hear stuff such as "I just love watching the Waxwings, there are 30 of them in the rowen in front of my house" - because they are waxwings and they do look almost tropical. And Twitter is such a great little app to send small messages across to both people you know as well as those that you do know. You can send out a message to twitterspace both if someone has a recipe for moussaka or if someone is interested to share a ride with you for a twitch. I would be sad to loose that aspect.
With hashtags the page http://twitter.com/rarevine becomes superfluous as you can subscribe for the feed of the hash-tag instead.
The other thing that has not been mentioned is the RSS feeder application that is down-loaded to the telephone. It is not 100% necessary of course, but makes reading the feeds more immediate. Messages that you send from your phone do not have to be SMS - but rather from a Twitter client also uploaded to the phone.

With hashtags you can have a long set of different tags for different purposes. I had a slightly more restricted use in mind for the hashtag #UBrba sort of only including quite rare birds. For most of the birds currently showing on rarevine I pictured regional hashtag codes that people could subscribe to. With a RSS reader one could subcribe to an almost unlimited number of hashtag feeds.
In a message you don't have to limit to only one hashtag word. If you identify #Rarevine as the birds occuring on Bird Guides, and perhaps #UKrba as the megas, you have already two hashtags there. I would add a third level of regionality for which you would need a third hashtag. But that is OK, still plenty of space to give details.

Nevertheless, I shall edit my article and include in it also #rarevine. This is a good idea, and it shall make the bird info free in the end and shared between the users.

Kind of funny we are working along similar ideas.

Gunnar
 
Markus,

That is great. I had no idea......
Nevertheless, have a look at my approach. You don't need to be connected by the page twitter.com/rarevine and James Spencer does not have to worry about the 38 people he follow all of a sudden start sending stuff without relevance about birds. I think you have figured this out by now, as you are using the hashtags, which is really the key to it all. The thing is that the birders don't have to restrict their tweets just about rare birds and people that are following each other do so because they actually like to hear stuff such as "I just love watching the Waxwings, there are 30 of them in the rowen in front of my house" - because they are waxwings and they do look almost tropical. And Twitter is such a great little app to send small messages across to both people you know as well as those that you do know. You can send out a message to twitterspace both if someone has a recipe for moussaka or if someone is interested to share a ride with you for a twitch. I would be sad to loose that aspect.
With hashtags the page http://twitter.com/rarevine becomes superfluous as you can subscribe for the feed of the hash-tag instead.
The other thing that has not been mentioned is the RSS feeder application that is down-loaded to the telephone. It is not 100% necessary of course, but makes reading the feeds more immediate. Messages that you send from your phone do not have to be SMS - but rather from a Twitter client also uploaded to the phone.

With hashtags you can have a long set of different tags for different purposes. I had a slightly more restricted use in mind for the hashtag #UBrba sort of only including quite rare birds. For most of the birds currently showing on rarevine I pictured regional hashtag codes that people could subscribe to. With a RSS reader one could subcribe to an almost unlimited number of hashtag feeds.
In a message you don't have to limit to only one hashtag word. If you identify #Rarevine as the birds occuring on Bird Guides, and perhaps #UKrba as the megas, you have already two hashtags there. I would add a third level of regionality for which you would need a third hashtag. But that is OK, still plenty of space to give details.

Nevertheless, I shall edit my article and include in it also #rarevine. This is a good idea, and it shall make the bird info free in the end and shared between the users.

Kind of funny we are working along similar ideas.

Gunnar

thanks Gunnar - some top ideas here
 
Markus,

That is great. I had no idea......
Nevertheless, have a look at my approach. You don't need to be connected by the page twitter.com/rarevine and James Spencer does not have to worry about the 38 people he follow all of a sudden start sending stuff without relevance about birds. I think you have figured this out by now, as you are using the hashtags, which is really the key to it all. The thing is that the birders don't have to restrict their tweets just about rare birds and people that are following each other do so because they actually like to hear stuff such as "I just love watching the Waxwings, there are 30 of them in the rowen in front of my house" - because they are waxwings and they do look almost tropical. And Twitter is such a great little app to send small messages across to both people you know as well as those that you do know. You can send out a message to twitterspace both if someone has a recipe for moussaka or if someone is interested to share a ride with you for a twitch. I would be sad to loose that aspect.
With hashtags the page http://twitter.com/rarevine becomes superfluous as you can subscribe for the feed of the hash-tag instead.
The other thing that has not been mentioned is the RSS feeder application that is down-loaded to the telephone. It is not 100% necessary of course, but makes reading the feeds more immediate. Messages that you send from your phone do not have to be SMS - but rather from a Twitter client also uploaded to the phone.

With hashtags you can have a long set of different tags for different purposes. I had a slightly more restricted use in mind for the hashtag #UBrba sort of only including quite rare birds. For most of the birds currently showing on rarevine I pictured regional hashtag codes that people could subscribe to. With a RSS reader one could subcribe to an almost unlimited number of hashtag feeds.
In a message you don't have to limit to only one hashtag word. If you identify #Rarevine as the birds occuring on Bird Guides, and perhaps #UKrba as the megas, you have already two hashtags there. I would add a third level of regionality for which you would need a third hashtag. But that is OK, still plenty of space to give details.

Nevertheless, I shall edit my article and include in it also #rarevine. This is a good idea, and it shall make the bird info free in the end and shared between the users.

Kind of funny we are working along similar ideas.

Gunnar


Took a while to get my head round hashtags and feeds when I first saw Twitter - the possibility of a free rarebird service using it was all I had and somebody suggested I tried it. At the moment its mostly daily summaries using #rarevine but I was hoping for people to contribute from the field with rare bird sightings relaying in real time rather than the time it takes birdguides or RBA (less so). Hopefully more people follow rarevine and contribute - we beat birdguides with the Ivory Gull in Ireland and may have beaten RBA. Hopefully people will start to send in reports from other rare birds soon.
 
James

It shall take off soon...I am totally convinced. I am including #ravevine as an example in the article after editing it today. Does ravevine cover UK and Ireland or only the UK?
I am leaving #UKrba for Megas. The Ivory Gull would have qualified for that I guess.

It would be useful to create a number of regional hashtags as I mentioned. I suggest to use the local listservers to define the areas. I am on some but not all and know too little about the British birding scene to make precise recommendations, but will happily help to promote if somebody else will get the ball rolling. Once you get the it going on the local level it will be much easier to promote #rarevine and #UKrba (if you at all want to keep a Mega tag?)

For the sake of argument here are three suggest local hashtags
#cumrba Birding Cumbria rare bird alert
#camrba Cambridge area birdalert
#buckrba Buckinghamshire rare bird alert

and so on.....

Once you have completed the list with hashtags make sure to include such hashtags also in your summery on #rarevine with a couple of observations for each hash, time is ripe to send a message to that list serv that the system has been created.

Feel free to use the manual as you please as you please for this purpose.

Maybe you or someone else can help me getting some screen shots to illustrate it with?
Don't miss the fact that you can include in an abbreviated url the exact location with google maps or google earth.

For the link to the updated manual here it is again:
http://www.kolibriexpeditions.com/birdingperu/blog/index.php/twitter-for-birders-part-2-rare-bird-alerts-with-twitter/

Gunnar
 
Rareviners,

Just to let you know, I am testing two different RSS readers for my cell phone. There is a delay from the time the tweet is sent untill it shows on the phone. Sorry for using the #rarevine hashtag to do so. However, hopefully some twitters will find #rarevine this way...and check it out.

Gunnar
 
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