In our never-ending quest to bring you the features you request (and deserve), we’re launching tag support!

The first place you’ll probably notice this is on the People Page. A tag cloud now shows the most popular interests of Birdstack users. Use it to find people with interests similar to your own, or just get to know the Birdstack community better. To make your interests show up in the cloud, edit your user profile.

But perhaps more significantly, you can now use tags to organize your observations in new and interesting ways. To take an example from a thread on the forums, you could use tags to group observations by regions like “Panhandle,” “South Texas Brushlands,” etc. Or, you could use a “hawknest” tag to keep track of hawk nests around your county. Or, a “rain” tag for observations made in the rain. Or, “standingonmyhead” for observations made while, well, you get the idea. Really, it’s up to you how you use tags. The possibilities are endless!

Once you have tags on your observations, a tag cloud will appear on your profile page and dashboard, showing the most popular tags used in your observations. You can also search by tags and use tags to construct lists and stacks.

We’ve also just deployed the ability to add links to your observations, locations, and trips. This is a great way to associate your observations with an online photo gallery or maybe link a trip to a blog post. Just look on the edit pages for observations, locations, and trips, and you’ll find a new box where you can add a URL that will then show up when that item is viewed.

We hope you enjoy these new features! Ask on the forums if you’ve got any questions about how to use them. Or, maybe share some ideas you have for unique ways to use tags to organize observations!

At the request of several Birdstack members, we have updated the location fields on member profiles. You can now select the country where you live (or with which you identify most closely) from a dropdown list, and then you can search for Birdstack members from the same country. But until more people fill in their countries, the searches will come up empty or yield minimal results. So, we hope you’ll add your country today.

In addition, we’ve made the “Location” field clickable and searchable so you can find other Birdstack members near you.

You can access a search page through the main “People” page, and you can edit your own profile through the link on your Dashboard.

You asked for it … you got it!

After a downtime of approximately five hours, Birdstack is operational again. The problem appears to have been caused by power fluctuations at our hosting provider. We are taking steps to ensure that we can recover much more quickly from such problems in the future. We sincerely apologize for the outage.

Birdstack has gone down unexpectedly today. We’ll get it back up and running as soon as possible, hopefully within a few hours. Hang in there!

eBird is now in a beta-testing period for South American and Antarctic data entry, so we’ve updated Birdstack’s eBird export tool to include your observations from the following countries and territories: Anguilla, Antarctica, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Aruba, Bahamas, Baker Island, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Cayman Islands, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Falkland Islands (Malvinas), French Guiana, Greenland, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Howland Island, Jamaica, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Martinique, Mexico, Midway Islands, Montserrat, Navassa Island, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Palmyra Atoll, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, U.S. Minor Outlying Islands, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Virgin Islands (British), Virgin Islands (U.S.), Wake Island.

Here’s how it works.

Whether you live in the Western Hemisphere or not, we hope you’ll take part in this important collaborative effort. By contributing some of your data to eBird, you make it available for scientists and researchers studying bird distribution and population trends. You’re helping put together a wondrous and intricate puzzle.

And you know what? That makes you special. I think you deserve a giant slice of peanut butter pie. Mmmmmm. If we had a budget, I’d buy pie for everyone!

On April 3 at 11:30 p.m. EDT (UTC: 2008-4-4 at 3:30 a.m.) we will be taking the main Birdstack server down for up to 1 hour in order to perform routine maintenance. That means there will be no way to access the site during this time, and your stacks will not load on other websites. We’ll do our best to get it back up as quickly as possible (hopefully less than an hour).

This will be our first major downtime since the site launched back in January, and we don’t plan on any more downtime after this for quite a while. Thanks for your patience.