We’ve just rolled out a new private messaging feature called Conversations.

You can view and send messages by following the link on your dashboard, by clicking the envelope icon in the header, or by clicking “Start conversation” on a Birdstack member’s profile page.

By default, you will receive notifications of new messages at the email address associated with your Birdstack account. But as always, you can adjust your email notification preferences on your account settings page, which is accessible through the dashboard.

Several of you have asked for a feature like this, so we hope it will be helpful and that it will encourage further communitization for all!

Here at the Birdstack labs (Ha! We wish we had a lab!), we’ve just finished up a shiny new feature. We’ve been working on it for awhile, so without further ado … (drumroll please!)

Maps showing everybody’s observations are now available on species pages. Let’s take a look at the Galah page for an example. (Galahs are stunning pink Australian cockatoos. They look like raspberry sherbet, mmmm.)

I’d like to point out several things in the example above. First and most obvious is the map peppered with markers. You can click on a marker to find out more about observations made at that location. Clicking the link (see where my mouse is hovering?) will take you to Mosura’s page for that particular observation.

You’ll also note, circled in red, the “My observations” link. This link appears when you are logged in to your Birdstack account, and as you’d expect, it reloads the map with only your observations displayed.

Then below the map, you can see the page numbers, also circled in red. To keep the maps from being too slow and unwieldy, 50 observations are loaded at at time. If you want to see more, click on those links to keep exploring!

Now, you may or may not have noticed that the whole World Bird List section of Birdstack is now searchable. There’s a box at the top of order, family, genus, and species pages. You can type English family names, species name fragments, binomials, etc. into that box, and we’ll show you whatever we can find. That should make it easy to start exploring the maps.

Finally, I should explain which observations show up on the maps and which ones don’t. Observations must meet the following criteria to be displayed on the public maps:

1. The observation is public, not private.
2. The location is public, not private.
3. The location has latitude and longitude coordinates.

Again, that’s for public maps. When you click the “My observations” link, you (and only you) should be able to see your private observations and your observations made at private locations.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go check out some maps! While you’re at it, you might see some big holes in distributions, or species that aren’t represented at all. We’re guessing that you have data that can help fill those gaps — maybe it’s still in a paper notebook, or maybe you just haven’t added latitude and longitude to your list of locations.

So remember, just like the little Dutch boy did with the dike, if you see a hole, plug it up! (OK, OK, one of my Dutch friends insists that the story is merely an American fable, but you now have the power to do what the little Dutch boy never did.)

Birdstack’s database has just been upgraded to conform with version 1.6 of the IOC’s World Bird Names project. Because this is our first major taxonomic update, we’ve been carefully working through the ramifications for you and for the Birdstack service. Most of you will be affected by this update.

The IOC announced: “Major features include alignments with Rasmussen and Anderton (2005) for the avifauna of South Asia, BirdLife World List International Version 1.0, and Christidis and Boles (2008) for the Australian avifauna.

“This update also includes taxonomic updates published or identified in peer reviewed journals since the posting of Version 1.5, upgrades of seabird taxonomy, and revisions of Ranges and English names, including Great Black-headed Gull (=Pallas’s Gull), Roughleg (=Rough-legged Buzzard), and others.”

Changes to English names, binomials, family assignments, and the like have been made automatically in the database. If you would like more information about the changes that have taken place, you can peruse the World Birds Names updates pages.

Other types of changes, though, will require your input. Most of you will see a pending taxonomic updates box in the right sidebar when you log into your Birdstack account. When you follow this link, you will see a list of the observations that need to be reassigned to newly created species.

Here’s a video that explains the process: taxonomic updates screencast (link updated 19 October 2008).

Because this is the first time we’ve gone through an update like this, please let us know how it goes for you as you work through the changes. Also, we’d love to see you talking with each other on the forums, offering advice and discussing the updates that have occurred.

Here’s some final information about the IOC list and the direction it’s headed. If you look carefully at the update pages on the World Bird Names web pages, you will see that there are many “proposed splits” included in the list, and that there are lumps that are pending but haven’t actually occurred.

The organizers of the IOC list are treating it as a work in progress — from my perspective a very reasonable way to proceed given the massive changes we are seeing in all levels of bird taxonomy and nomenclature. Here are some comments I received from Dr. Frank Gill:

“We opted to use this category [proposed splits] to be as current as possible with the literature, but with the recognition that some of them might not be accepted by leading authorities or us. So we post them as a first step, with a window of opportunity for feedback and review before conversion to ‘actual splits.’ We suspect that 90% or so will convert in 6 months’ time.

“More specifically, we view these as editorial steps towards the release of version 2.0 in January 2009, for which we will evaluate the decisions by BirdLife, AOU, etc. [...]

“[...] Our philosophy is that distinct allopatric populations should be recognized as species until it is proven that they will interbreed freely with another such population, and judged conspecific. [...]”

There are lots more changes ahead, but don’t fear. Rejoice! Birdstack is here to help.

Have you been wondering whether anyone makes comments on your Birdstack pages? Do you feel sad because no one ever answers the comments you make on their pages? Well, friend, rejoice and wonder no more — comment notification is here!

This feature has been a long time in coming, and we’re excited to launch it today. As you have probably noticed, you can comment on each other’s observations, locations, trips, and Birdstack profiles, but it’s very difficult to keep track of or follow up on those comments. Many of you have stored several thousand pages of information in Birdstack, so how could you possibly notice a new comment somewhere on one of those pages? It’s the proverbial needle in a not-so-proverbial haystack.

But now — drumroll please! — you have two options for tracking and engaging with comments.

Option 1: You can receive emails every time somebody comments on one of your observations, trips, or locations; on your profile; or on a discussion that you begin in the forums. Really, that’s five options all rolled into one! All five choices are turned on by default. To change them, access your account settings page through your dashboard.

Option 2: Comment threads are now available as Atom feeds. Just look for the orange feed icon next to the “Comments” header on profiles, observations, locations, and trips. And you’ll also find feed icons on the forum discussion pages. You can subscribe to comments on your own pages, but you can also subscribe to anybody else’s (for example, to comments on your friend’s Birdstack profile) or to a discussion topic in the forum.

Comments are a hip, easy way to communitize with other Birdstackers — which we have heard you say over and over is important to you. So go on, comment away! I think I’ll go make a few more comments myself….

Yours, till full communitization is at last achieved,

David and the Birdstack team

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!

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