You asked for it, and now you’ve got it! We’ve just launched a location merging feature to help you eliminate duplicate locations or collapse locations for other reasons. The feature is simple to use — just go to the edit page for the location you’d like to merge, scroll down, and select the target location. More info on the help page.

We hope this will be helpful!

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.

Birdstack users can now export qualifying North American observations to eBird, a scientific database that collects observational data from the Western Hemisphere. Learn more about eBird.

The process is straightforward. From any of your lists, click the “Export” link and then follow the instructions for downloading an eBird export file. Then you can log in to eBird (you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one) and upload your file through the “Submit Observations” link. To learn more about the process and the requirements for observations submitted to eBird, you can read the eBird export documentation.

Currently, you can export records from North America (Canada, Mexico, the US, and the Caribbean) from Birdstack to eBird. eBird has recently expanded its scope to include the entire Western Hemisphere, and we are working with the eBird team to enable exports for Central and South America as well. We’ll make an announcement as soon as that is completed.

Data sharing and collaboration is important to us here at Birdstack, so where thrilled to be making this step. Please give it a try and let us know how it’s working for you.

About two hours ago, we (Curtis Hawthorne and David Ringer) launched Birdstack, a free, online world bird listing service. We’ve been working on Birdstack since June 2007, when we were in Yaounde, Cameroon. We’d been discussing it for even longer than that, since sometime back in 2005. We are relieved, thrilled, and excited to see it come alive at last.

Birdstack is for everyone who cares about birds. Whether you stay at home and watch the familiar birds at your feeder, or whether you slough through swamps in distant corners of the world, you can use Birdstack.

Birdstack lets you record observations of birds seen anywhere on the planet. You can plot your observations with startling accuracy on interactive maps and group the observations into trips. You can use Birdstack’s powerful query builder to create almost any kind of list you can imagine. And once you have a list, you can publish it as an Atom feed, grab a Stack (a special widget) and stick in on your own blog or website, or download your data for customized queries and analysis.

Birdstack uses the IOC (Gill and Wright) list for taxonomy and nomenclature, and whenever there are updates, they will be automatically integrated with your observations. A full suite of tools, from a simple spell check to user-generated alternate name suggestions, will help you find the birds you’re looking for.

Birdstack includes a variety of community-building features, including comments, forums, rankings, and a “recent observations” board. If you like, you can use Birdstack as your own personal listing software, keeping everything private, but it’s going to be much more fun to participate in the community.

Finally, we are working with the great folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to develop a way for Birdstack users to submit their North American data to eBird. We expect to launch the first phase of this feature sometime in the next month, so stay tuned.

For more information, you can go through the Birdstack tour and documentation.

Before we close (we’re sure you’re anxious to go sign up), we want to thank all the people around the world (on four continents!) who helped us beta-test Birdstack. Without their patience and attention to detail, Birdstack wouldn’t be what it is today. So thank you, John Beetham, Patrick Belardo, Lisa Berger, Mike Bergin, Rasmus Bøgh, Brent Bradbury, Charley Burwick, Sally Conyne, Geoff Darling, Tobias DiGennaro, David Donsker, Duncan Fraser, Brent Garber, Frank Gill, Eng-Li Green, Dave and Melanie Hawthorne, Sarah Hess, Marshall Iliff, Dan Jones, Josh Jones, Craig Miller, Jason Pike, David and Kathy Ringer, Kristel Ringer, Frew Schmidt, Claudia Staab, Jason Steele, Greg Swick, Nathan Swick, Brian Taylor, Forrest and Nancy Van Cott, Sara Van Cott, Jan Hein van Steenis, YC Wee, Anders Weijnitz, Charles Wesley, and Chris Wood.

Thanks to all, and good birding. Now, go try out Birdstack!

David and Curtis