For the scoop, check out the screencast and have a quick look at the help page.

Photos are popping up all over the site already, so jump in there and show us your best work!

Photos have been one of our most requested features for the past couple of years, and after months of work, they are now very close indeed.

In fact, you may start seeing them in activity feeds and on your friends’ pages already. (Birdstack member thainamu has already been busy!)

Today we launched a limited beta test of our photo upload functionality, which will be coming for all Birdstack members soon. But right now, the beta test is open only to Supporting Members. If you’d like to get in on the action right away, you can become a Supporting Member. (And once the beta test is over, you’ll have more storage space available than you would with a free account.)

But we’re committed to making as much of Birdstack free as possible, and everyone will have the ability to upload photos when the beta phase ends later this month.

Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below!

Update: Right now, our billing system setup means we have to manually confirm new supporting members. Rest assured that we will activate new supporting memberships as soon as possible, but if you sign up while we’re asleep or away from our computers, you might have to wait a few hours. Sorry about that.

But now you can specify your local time zone on your account settings page (accessible through the dashboard). This will convert all system dates to your time zone, making it easier to tell when things like comments and activity feed items were actually posted.

And for those of you who live in places that use daylight saving time, these changes will be made automatically for you!

Note that user-entered times on observations and trips will NOT change based on your time zone selection. This is intentional. If somebody records an observation made at 6 p.m. in Sydney, you don’t want to see it presented as having occurred 2:00 a.m., you want to know what time of day the observer was experiencing the bird.

Another new option is to see dates shown in either month-day or day-month format. By default, all dates are shown as 4 February 2009. But now you can choose to show the month first: February 4, 2009.

Similarly, we’ve introduced an option to format times in 12-hour format (11:00 PM instead of the default 23:00).

Again, these new options are available on your account settings page, accessible via your dashboard.

Enjoy!

1. Friends! Visit any Birdstack member’s profile and you’ll see an “Add as friend” link.
2. Activity feeds! If you thought the recent observations board was cool, you’re going to love activity feeds.

Since our earliest beta tests in January ’08, you have been expressing your interest in other Birdstackers — who they are, where they’ve been, what they’re seeing, and how to stay in touch with them. In the months since we launched, many of you have suggested that we add more social networking features, which confirmed hopes and ideas we’ve had since before we even launched Birdstack.

So, you’ve been asking for it, and now it’s here. You can click “Add as friend” on any Birdstacker’s profile page, and that person will receive a notification of your request. (Email notifications are optionally available, and you will also see notifications on your dashboard and in the notifications area at the very top of each page.) Once the notification is accepted, you’ll be friends on Birdstack.

Activity feeds give you a running commentary on what people have been seeing and where. There’s more info about activity feeds and friends in the Q&A below:

OK, I want a friend, but where can I find one?

1. Ooo, pick me! (Here’s my profile.) I’d be happy to be your first friend on Birdstack. Curtis is a cool guy too.
2. You can search for other Birdstackers based on location, interests, etc. Explore the people page, and don’t miss the “search” link near the top of the page.
3. You probably have birding friends who aren’t on Birdstack yet. Send them invitations to join Birdstack, and then welcome them by adding them as friends!

Where can I see activity feeds in action?

Check out the people page or any Birdstacker’s profile. Once you have some friends on Birdstack, you’ll see a snippet of a friend’s recent activity on your dashboard, and you’ll also have a special page that shows recent updates from all of your friends. If you see something interesting in the feeds, don’t forget to pop over and leave a comment for your friend!

Shouldn’t activity feeds be available as Atom feeds, as comments and lists already are?

Yes, yes, they should. We’re working on that.

Will any of this violate my privacy?

No. If you mark your data as private, it stays private and won’t show up an any activity feeds. If you mark something as private after it’s already shown up your activity feed, it will be removed.

What if I don’t want any friends?

Well, that would be sad. But we understand that some of you want to use Birdstack’s powerful data storage and processing capabilities and leave it at that. That’s OK. You don’t have to send any friend requests, and you can ignore any that you receive.

I just added some observations. Why aren’t they showing up in my activity feed yet?

Activity feeds are updated every few minutes.

I like it! I don’t like it! I have another idea!

We want to know what you think. Leave a comment here or use the contact form.

Happy communitizing!

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!

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.)

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.

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

We hope this will be helpful!

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!