New bird trip report website (1 Viewer)

[temmie]

New bird trip report website replacing travellingbirder

Hi guys,

check out the most complete/advanced/... bird trip report site :t:
www.cloudbirders.com

edit: changed the title...

 

[Steve Arlow]

Maybe the replacement for the now defunct Travellingbirder website, it would be good to have a single source of all trip reports again, add as much as possible and get it known.

 

[Dave Williams]

They have a report written by me listed so I presume there is a link with Travellingbirder as I didn't know this site existed

 

[temmie]

They have a report written by me listed so I presume there is a link with Travellingbirder as I didn't know this site existed

Some info:
The site is erected by some Belgian birdwatchers who have a lot of world birding experience, and experience writing reports.

They wanted to have a site like travellingbirder, but with a rating system and with more detailed search options. It took some months to screen the internet for all travel reports, so the site is, at this moment, not hosting the reports themselves but rather providing the links to the reports hosted by e.g. surfbirds, netfugl etcetera. I don't know how many reports travellingbirder had, but cloudbirders will be not far off, even in this early stadium.

As the site is now open for the big public, people can upload reports after registration. The upload will be screened, and placed in the right category by the editors. In this way, there is a kind of quality control on the uploads, e.g. reports will not end up in the wrong country etc.

Ofcourse, the quality of the report is mostly the work of the authors, and to make searching for good reports more valuable, ratings can be given based on the detail and quality of information provided. I don't know if ratings can be given at this moment.

Travellingbirder was a fantastic initiative, but it had its flaws.
Cloudbirders has tried to make it faster and more efficient to search for reports, and praises itself as fully independent. Reports by commercial organisations are included nevertheless, but you can filter them either in or out. Another nice feature is that you can search for your own reports (search by author). And last but not least, any comment/error can be easily reported by email to the link on the bottom on the page (contact).

Hopefully, the search option for e.g. annotated/basic checklist, and the checkbox for GPS will encourage people to include as many details as possible in their reports, so other birders can benefit from this information.

enjoy the cloudbirding and I wish you all sunny skies

 

[Phil Andrews]

Thank you - there is a God!

 

[hampers]

Have to say that first impressions are excellent. I found it easy to navigate and find what I wanted.

Phil

 

[Jos Stratford]

Agreed this could be a fantastic development ...seems to work effectively and be easy to navigate (rather sterile opening page, etc, though )

I would say you could add all my reports ... but they are all there already! As it is links to my reports, not takes them, I have no problem with this at all, but just as a question of interest, how they are getting/finding the reports (mine were not on Travelling Birder).

If my reports are being added automaitically, does it mean I need never manually add reports myself (yippee if so )


Oo, edit, playing with the new site, I see all the reports from many countries (US, Canada, South Africa, etc etc) are mine ... gee, am I famous or is nobody else travelling?!

 

[Jos Stratford]

As said, seems an excellent site in the making, would advise a slight tweak to make the opening pages a little less sterile, maybe some colour or, shudder, a bird or something (a minor issue I agree) and maybe a link to 'who we are', my immediate thought on seeing the new site.

 

[temmie]

Hi Jos,

reports that were on the internet until this date were scrutinisely searched for and linked to CB. Ofcourse, not all are included because they only exist in the dark corners of the internet, but a huge effort was done with approx. 10 people for some months (make that half a year).
For new reports, I don't know what will happen, best of all would be that people upload the link or the pdf after registration (feel free to do so).
The registration is meant to serve as a barrier to keep out the opportunistic reports.

People behind the idea (and that is not me) are a solid group of 5-6 hardcore birdwatchers with the added talent of making websites (at least some of them). Cloudbirders will be extended with IOC and Clements lists in the near future, but I cannot say how this will look like (better: if I say something, I am maybe promising too much ;-)

The site will not be heavily promoted as it speaks for itself. So no flashy logo's, banners, ... Only relevant and maybe a little understated, but that is fully depending on the taste of 1-2 people who started all of this (no names )

 

[GDK]

hi Temmie,

Looks great, I have registered and will upload a few reports that were lost with the travellingbirder demise when i have some time.

I think Travellingbirder had, by the end of its days, managed to accumulate a fairly large number of reports directly posted to the site - and now therefore seemingly lost.

I could speculate that maybe an issue with TB was the amount of reports, size and time taken in uploading reports on a voluntary basis. There is no guidance on pdfs that I can see on this new website. eg is there a max upload size - travellingbirder was 5mb? Im sure the team behind this new website are aware of any potential pitfalls though!

The new site looks very simple to use and effective with some good searches, and Ill look forward to using it when preparing for my next birding trip.

Thanks to all involved,

 

[temmie]

hi Temmie,

Looks great, I have registered and will upload a few reports that were lost with the travellingbirder demise when i have some time.

I think Travellingbirder had, by the end of its days, managed to accumulate a fairly large number of reports directly posted to the site - and now therefore seemingly lost.

I could speculate that maybe an issue with TB was the amount of reports, size and time taken in uploading reports on a voluntary basis. There is no guidance on pdfs that I can see on this new website. eg is there a max upload size - travellingbirder was 5mb? Im sure the team behind this new website are aware of any potential pitfalls though!

The new site looks very simple to use and effective with some good searches, and Ill look forward to using it when preparing for my next birding trip.

Thanks to all involved,

Hi Gareth,

what I do know is that newly uploaded .pdf's will get some kind of filter (being viewed by the team) before they are visible to the site, so your upload will not be visible immediately. For what could happen in case you have a very big .pdf, I simply do not know. It is best to communicate with info at cloudbirders dot com directly, and maybe post feedback here. Uploaded reports require more storage and traffic on the website, but one of the guys works for a very big company on web storage and servers, so I guess that very big .pdf's shouldn't be a problem.

At this moment, almost everything available on the WWW is on the site (think surfbirds, netfugl, club300SE, birdquest, and so many others), so cloudbirders acts as a efficient and more or less complete search engine with birder-specific queries.

 

[njlarsen]

Just for curiosity, I checked myself as author. What I have uploaded to Netfugl was listed, but not what I have uploaded to Blake's repository (http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/maybank/main.htm#TRIPS) and also not what I have uploaded here in Birdforum http://www.birdforum.net/forumdisplay.php?f=244. There is therefore still room for additions.

Niels

 

[temmie]

Hi Niels,

thank you for noticing this.

Some sites are in the process of being linked, such as Birding the Americas (where your link is leading to), but also e.g. fieldguides, LPO, Kingbird tours, naturetrek, ... just to name a few. Worldtwitch, Tropical birding and some others are being uploaded (better: linked) at the moment.

In a nearby future (i.e. 1-2 months), most of those will be uploaded. Ofcourse, reports keep coming and not all reports are easy to find.
Up to now, links to forums have not been made. It seems to me that both can coexist: forums are generally used for interaction, while it will be encouraged for people to gather the info in a .pdf and upload to either cloudbirders or their own server.

 

[McMadd]

Maybe a mod can merge the threads?

http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=253201

http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=253124

 

[ianreid]

Awesome stuff, thank you so much!!!

Ian

 

[temmie]

Cloudbirders is now on facebook: www.facebook.com/cloudbirders

From the facebook page:

"I guess it's time for our first post on the brandnew CloudBirders Facebook page!

CloudBirders went live exactly one week ago, on Thursday 21st March 2013.
In the last 7 days we had about 2500 unique visitors, which we're pretty happy about, considering that the only active promotion we did was a single (unplanned!) post on Facebook.

The site is the result of about 6 months of hard work by a group of Belgian world birding enthusiasts.
Originally, the plan was to create a website with a slightly different focus in fact, concentrating more on world list management - and it is still the long term plan to add this functionality. However, the unfortunate disappearance of the fabulous TravellingBirder website made us shift the initial focus of the site to providing a new central repository for birding trip reports - and that is where we are today.

We received some questions on how the data on the site is gathered and managed, so here's a bit of background information on that topic.

The 9000+ trip reports which we have in the database today have all been added manually by our dedicated team of web crawling volunteers. We do not use an automatic birding trip report finder program that auto-fills the database, for reasons of quality control, data accuracy and security.
As you can imagine, adding the reports in this way is a big job, and although we try hard to stay up-to-date, we do need help from you, the world birder community, to notify us of new or undiscovered trip reports that haven't made it onto CloudBirders yet.
So if you have written a new report, or if you know of an existing birding trip report which isn't featured on CloudBirders yet, please do use the upload feature on the website, or drop us an e-mail, or post a link on this Facebook page: we will take it from there, and eternal gratitude will be yours.

It is also possible to upload your own birding trip reports in PDF format to CloudBirders so we can host them for you.
Here are a few rules and guidelines regarding this process.
1. You can only upload trip reports when you are logged in; it is not possible to upload anonymously.
2. We only accept trip reports in PDF format.
3. Maximum size of a trip report is 5MB.
4. After you have uploaded a PDF, it may take a day or so before the report is reviewed and added to the site. We screen for content (to make sure the trip report description matches the content, and to filter out spam or obviously commercial content) and viruses/threats (basic scan only). Most of us have a day job too so a slight delay is inevitable unfortunately.

All for now... any questions, let us know.
We'll post the above information on the site as well over the next few weeks."

 

[Alf King]

Thank you for this. It looks like an excellent beginning.

 

[hampers]

Just researching a trip to Thailand, did a search and found many trip reports for my perusal. Great resource, easy to use. Thank you very much.

Phil

 

[Steve Babbs]

Superb! Thanks to all involved. Your efforts are really appreciated.

 

[temmie]

Just for curiosity, I checked myself as author. What I have uploaded to Netfugl was listed, but not what I have uploaded to Blake's repository (http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/maybank/main.htm#TRIPS) and also not what I have uploaded here in Birdforum http://www.birdforum.net/forumdisplay.php?f=244. There is therefore still room for additions.

Niels

Hi Niels,

in addition to your comment, I got a reply of one of the guys behind CB, asking me to post this (note the bold parts):

The trip reports database of CloudBirders is already pretty big, and we hope it will continue to grow over time. We warmly welcome everybody to cooperate by submitting new links, both links to your own reports but also from other authors. Uploading files, on the other hand, can only be done if you are the author of a report or have the permission to do so. When referring to a report on a forum/blog, please submit the url of the first page of that report only.

More details can be found at: http://www.cloudbirders.com/info/about