Social Media

by Gunnar Engblom June 30, 2009 7

Fear of Twitter? Do a two week test run!

Twitter does not have to be complicated.

I just checked with my 1500 facebook friends if they are on Twitter or not. I got very few replies. Some that answered said: I hardly have time with Facebook, why should I emerge myself in Twitter. I will go crazy and get nothing done.

Good point. But considering all the good use Twitter can bring, you need to be convinced by testing it. How can you know if you don’t try? And what should you do not to drown in information overload? You need a short-cut not to waste your time!

I am specifically writing this to my birding friends, who seem to have a particularly big aversion towards Twitter. But anyone can make use of the recommendations I give below to testdrive Twitter to see if it is for you.

Twitter is a great tool for birders that most birders have not yet discovered. You can follow (befriend) anyone that shares the same interest as you. Facebook requires acceptance, so in this respect Facebook is more limited. The fact that anyone can see your posts, should in reality allow easier communication among birders. Here is an introduction to Twitter I wrote a couple a months back: Twitter for birders. Part 1. An introduction. Read this before you do anything else.

The one thing to remember is that you don’t have to read everything on twitter. It does not have to be a 24/7 activity. With for instance the free apps Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop – you can sort the people you follow into groups, and you may monitor streams of keywords – and lots of people you don’t follow. You will find both interesting stuff and interesting people to follow.
Next level for birders is to use Twitter as rare bird alert services – for free.

2 week test run. 10 steps to make Twitter useful

1. open an account.
2. Download Seesmic Desktop (I use Seesmic now myself, but used to use Tweetdeck)
3. Make searches in top right corner of Seesmic. I suggest you use birdwatching, birding and a non-birding related outgroup you are interested in – mine is marathon.

Seesmic desktop with search columns. Click on the image to see a larger format.

4. Spend a few days listening to what is going on.
5. Follow the people whose tweets interest you. Just put the cursor over the photo and click bottom right corner of the photo.
6. Eventually, you will want to respond to some tweets. Cursor over the photo and click upper right @sign.
7. Do some tweets of your own. By now you should have realized that the most interesting stuff that others tweeted was not what they had for breakfast or that they were walking the dog. As a birder a rare sighting or an interesting link probably had more value to you.
8. Get a mobile application for you iPhone, Blackberry or smartphone. This way you can read the people you follow on the go and interact with them.

Blackberry: Several twitter clients are mentioned in this article. Many people seems to prefer Social Scope today. A brand new client that also allows to update your google talk status is Über Twitter. I still use the classical Twitterberry, but shall be changing to either Social Scope or Über Twitter soon.
iPhone: Here is an article recommending a few Twitter clients for iPhone.
Smartphones (Nokia, Erikson, etc): Try ce Twit.

9. Keep on doing this for two weeks. By using Seesmic and a phone twitter client – you shall not find Twitter wasting your time. You shall be the pilot in full control at all times.
10. Add me @kolibrix to follow me. I promise I shall be your “support” during the test-drive if you need any questions to be answered.

Please let me know any link all of a sudden does not work. Twitter on Time Magazine photo Steve Garfield under Creative Commons license. All photos made by Gunnar Engblom on this blog may be used under Creative Commons license as long as they are attributed to the original article with a link.

by Gunnar Engblom April 27, 2009 3

Twitter Karma

Not on Twitter yet?

Well, in that case this post is not for you, unless these initial reasons I am listing here can convince you to jump onboard! I have dealt with why I like twitter on previous posts and why it can also be a time-sink and seemingly a complete waste of time. Here are some specific reasons why birders and nature bloggers should consider being on Twitter.

share a sighting
promote your blog
help promote blogs of others
recieve recommendations of good articles to read
know what your friends are doing
feel part of a community
get news quickly
keep on eye on the buzz
follow those that share an interest with you
subtly promoting a product or service you offer just by being a person behind the same product or service.

You simply add people to follow, that shares your interest. I have used Tweetdeck in which I search for all tweets containing birding and birdwatching to find people to follow.

As soon as any of the keywords is mentioned in a tweet, I will see this message in my Tweetdeck search column.

I check the last 20 posts of the twitter poster and if I think it sounds interesting enough I follow. The person I follow will get a little ping in the email saying that @kolibrix is now following. Hopefully, that person opens the link and can read my latest tweets and the short bio I have in my profile and consequently will follow back.

STOP PRESS: I just learnt about the New Seesmic desktop. A similar system as Tweetdeck but with even more possibilities. Coming any day now. If it does all it says it does I will probably move to Seesmic.

Why you should follow back?

Yesterday, I cleaned up my twitter account. I used two resourses. Friend or Follow and Twitter Karma that all0ws you see who is following back. I prefer Twitter Karma as it gives the possibility to check a few or all and bulk unfollow/follow. I was surprised to see that I followed over 330 people without a reciprokal follow. A large proportion were people who are no longer active on Twitter. No point in keeping them of course. But also, included were a few actively twittering birdwatchers.

I find it a bit surprising that a birder does not want to be connected with another birder on Twitter, so my best guess is that it is mere negligance. After all there were some 130 people following me that I was not following back. I made life simple and erased all the people not following back. Birders will get new pings from me following shortly as I still monitor birding activity and will add active birders one by one. I am also adding people interested in conservation and travel.
To keep my part of this deal, I started to follow all that I did not follow. I immediately got some very suspicious direct messages, so they will probably be spammers to keep away from. Those that send me spammy direct messages or porn suggestions will be both blocked and deleted. If you want to thank someone for following, do so openly, not in a direct message.

Why should you follow back? Because the same way you want to reach out with your tweets to your followers, your followers want to reach you with their tweets. But what if you are not interested in 95% percent of the time of what they had for breakfast and what birds they saw in the backyard. Tweetdeck gives the possibility to organize the people you want to follow more closely into a column.

Twitter Karma is about having about as many followers as you are following. What is your your Twitter Karma? Any of those that follow you, that you ought to follow?

Twitter -logo by Josh Seman

by Gunnar Engblom April 19, 2009 8

Gunnar’s little blog Carnival.

Luciana 2 years old - future nature blogger - studying the birds of Australia

My blog the other day was about blogging and how important it is to be connected to other bloggers. I introduced Google Reader for your desktop and a mobile RSS reader such as FreeRange to your Blackberry or smartphone. I suggest you check this post if what I just said had no meaning to you.
Another great way to connect to other bloggers is simply writing about them. Instead of writing a comment in their comment box, you write on your own blog an answer or a comment and this is directed to the comment box of that blog. This is called trackback and pingback. The difference between the two is subtle when it comes to the end result. Read more how it works on this WordPress link.

If you use wordpress, this is done automatically to other wordpress blogs (supposedly I should say, because there have been some problems reported lately related to WP 2.7. I will let you know how and if it works). To relate other blogs, you specify the blog address in the trackback box. For Blogger there is no trackback function, but you can activate linkback that simulates the service. For more advanced trackback, that you may also want to consider check Haloscan. A couple of years ago Haloscan was standard for trackback for Blogger blogs, but since there is little mention of Haloscan from recent years, my guess, without penetrating too much how this works on Blogger, is that the linkback service has improved and covers much what you need in this respect. Please comment, to let me know how it works. I did a small test in my post about Nature Blog Network blog the other day, and it seemed the pings worked fine with WordPress but only a link showed in those Blogger accounts that had activated linkback. I still have not found a blog that uses Haloscan, so I can’t give any opinion, but as far as I understand it should give a short quote.

Give a little Link-love to each other!

In a series of blogposts, I shall use this technique to comment other blogs and fish for readers to my own blog this way. I suggest you do the same. You probably heard of Blog Carnivals. Well, they work very much in this way. There is no reason why you can not, every once in a while host your own little carnival. While I am at it, I am adding every blog I write about to my Google Reader, and also put a link to my blog roll – and I hope you link back to me and add me to your readers as well.
I am not yet sure exactly what form this will take, but it is likely to be something like “news in my reader”. I am also considering setting up my own carnival for a young birders up to 22 years old that are blogging. More on that in another post. Let me know what you think about this idea?

Some new blogs in my blogroll.

I have read quite a few blogs the last weeks, some for the first time. I am surprise how many good blogs are out there that I had not heard of before. I know many of you would like to get more readers, so a mutual interchanging of mentioning other blogs and specific posts should work for everyone’s benefit.

I have choses to group my blog roll to different categories.

Social Media.

As I mentioned in my last blog I am doing an e-course during 31 days held by Problogger Darren Rowse. Some great tips are shared. Pretty amazing, this guy got 1000 people signed up to the course. Best part it is free. 11 days have past and it has been extremely useful. One task is to write a blogpost linking to others. In fact I had already, planned to do a blog-roll prior to the asignment, but the course is so good, that the least I can do is to pay a mentioning in my blog. Darren also runs a very popular blog for digital photography.
John Haydon of corporatedollar.org was one of the first people I followed on Twitter. His specialty is social media marketing for small non-profit organizations. His page is full of great advice. Do you know what the the difference is between pages, groups and profiles on facebook and how to use each the right way? Check out his killer tips in the link given.

New aquintances of birding blogs

Nutty birder is a blog by two young brothers Eric and Rob Ripma who blog about birds, wildlife and nature photography. I particularly zoom in on their post on plover identification, that they presented a couple of weeks ago. Hand on the heart, can you ID the plovers in this quiz? If not they provide a key with the key features to look for.
Discovering Alpine birds by Dale Forbes in Austria is an extremely well made blog. He does excellent digiscoping and shares many birding tricks, such as how to clean your lenses in the field. No more dirty T-shirt for me!
Some birders have been generous in retweeting my blogposts that I have sent out on Twitter. This is much appreciated of course. How to pay back? Well, for starters I tend to check out their blogs and just yesterday I found Laura Kammermeier’s excellent blog called Birds, Words and websites. The title is well choosen, because Laura is a writer and web-consultant and an avid birder. In happenend to land on part 2 of her story about chase for Black-headed Gull at Niagra Falls. I love this story. She says that finding the Black-headed Gull among a couple of thousand Bonnies is like that famous needle in the haystack.
Rachel Jenkins of Rachelbirder has also been generous with retweeting. She blogs about the wonderfuil nature around the farm where she lives in eastern Kentucky and has some automatic cameras on the trails that catch photos of wild turkeys, deer, foxes and racoons. One of these days, there may be a Puma, as she has found tracks nearby. In her blog there are lots of photos of nature. THe last post has an immature Bald Eagle as the star of the show.
Jochen of Bell Tower birding is one of the funniest birding bloggers I recently aquinted. His posts are extremely witty. Look at this one: “How to avoid being arrested for Bad Bird Photography“.
Wildbird on the fly is Wildbird magazine’s blog. They are good on news related to birds and had fast a blog post on the shooting of Californian Condors at Big Sur recently.
A DC Birding Blog by John Beetham – aka Dendroica is one of my favorite blogs. John is generous with retweets on Twitter and also fast on giving advice to anyone stuck with a query. His knowledge and span of blog topics make this a blog I often come back to. I am interested in splits (who isn’t?) so the recent news on the New Crossbill aptly covered by Dendroica is picked to illustrate his blog.
Jeff Gordon’s blog. Jeff is a professional tour guide and his posts are always a good read with many great photos, be it from Ecuador or Panama or at home in Delaware. The posts are often very entertaining spiced with humour and frequently very educational. A recent such post is about hunting Easter eggs in tropical latitudes compared to temperate regions and what consquense the hunt has on clutch sizes and life strategies.
I mentioned the NBN interview with Beverly Robertson in my last post about Nature Blog Network blog. From her blog Behind the Bins I selected an old post called Mal de Mer that was recommended in the interview. How come a birdwatcher can enjoy and suffer at same time during a pelagic? All about sea sickness.
Monarch’s Nature Blog is one of the top 10 birding blogs on NBN. I like his American Woodcock video blog posted a few days ago. I salute his work with mentoring teenagers to become naturalists inviting several as guest bloggers on his blog.
If you are new to bird blogging and your blog will be bird photo oriented, you may consider have Surfbirds.com hosting it, just as Falkland Birder Alan Henry. I have selected his post on Chilean Swallow – a rare bird in the Falklands – as an example of his blog. More examples of Surfbird blogs you find in the right column of the list on the Surfbirds.com blog page.
John Trapp’s blog – Birds etcetera. has also been generous to link back to my site. I really like his blog, because he alwasy seems to be coming up with concepts noone else have though of. He has ordered bird blogs into geographacial regions in his sidebar. Nor th America has no less than 468 bloggers! Britain has 237, while South America – mine included – has a modest 16. The other day John posted another song and video about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker – The Moss Piglets. With a slightly more talented singer with more than one octave register – less David Byrne (Talking Heads) like – this swiinging song would be a true hit.
Another top 10 birding blog is BirdFreak run by Eddie Callaway and Jenniger Outcalt. This has all the qualities in the world to become BIG. They do a lot of work to try to get kids to start birdwatch and have written two good downloadable manuals. They also host a weekly event called Bird Photography Weekly and do great bird book reviews. I have chosen to illustrate the blog with a book review of the Swedish bird painter Lars Jonsson (A hero to me ever since I started birding). His new coffee table book is called Paintings from a near Horizon.
American Birding Associations new blog Peeps online is only about a year old, but it is becoming a good summeries of the best birds seen all over the country. Here is an example. A Cuban Black-Hawk of unknown provinence has been sighted and photographed in Georgia on April 10 which would a new ABA record if accepted.
Dawn has a bloggy blog, I often come back to. She lives with her husband Jeff in a motorhome after having sold the house 7 years ago and now lives a nomadic lifestyle travellign all over the US. The blog is one of the best out there with a very attractive design. I have chosen to illustrate her blog with a recent unsuccessful morel hunt, that instead gave an owl. Stalking the wild Morel. Who gives a Hoot?
10000birds. I keep on coming back to this great blog. Charlie is now in Panama. Here is an update from Canopy Tower.
Last but not least. I am about to start a new carnival for young birders up to 22 years old. Ali Iyoob in North Carolina is only 14, but already a blogger since a month back. His blog is called “Ali’s birding Journal – the life of an obsessed birder. Here is a teaser Photo Quiz.

Hope you liked this little carnival. If all start facilitating the backlink option on Blogger and check out the Haloscan software, let me know how it works for you and if you start getting more readers and subscribers this way. Please send me suggestions of blogs of birders up to 22 years old.

by Gunnar Engblom March 27, 2009 5

I twitter therefore I am

Twittero, ergo sum

Had René Descartes been living today – I am sure he would have a philosophical view on Twitter. Maybe even doubting its existence or his own. How trivial can twitter really become?
I had a great laugh yesterday checking out this video.

The cartoon guy in the video says:
“Twittering is just randomly bragging about your unexceptional life.”

Although, I admit having tweeted about what I am eating or drinking at times, and made other trivial comments, I have to agree that too much of such stuff is a sure way to loose followers as explained in How to loose twitter followers in 1o steps. In spite of the time sink sometimes, one can find many useful ways to use Twitter. I have learnt much about Blogging and Social Media through Twitter. You can also get instant advice from your Twitter friends when needed.

Use Twitter wisely. How to avoid the Twitter Time-sink.

Here are some useful links.

Additionally, a few days ago web-designer depot wrote the ultimate Twitter guide. in fact it is so popular that right now as I am writing this it can not be accessed. Must have blown the server! Bookmark this article and come back in a few days and I am sure it works again.

Twitter for birders

I am sure most of my birding friends have seen my two manuals on Twitter for birders. If not here they are again:

Twitter for birders, part 1. An introduction
Twitter for birders, part 2. Hashtags, RSS and Twitter can be used as a mobile Rare Bird Alert

There is yet another Twitter-like application in Beta version called Chirp-tracker. It is more directed to birders. The big advatage for a birder is that there is less noice. Only birders are participating and chirping about birds. It will most likely become a huge success among birders. I hope it will become more like a proper Twitter-client in the future, so I can use it instead of Tweetdeck also for my non-birding tweeting. To try out the beta version. Get on Twitter and follow @chirptracker and ask to try out the beta version.

Let me know your favorite articles about Twitter and tips about applications.

Cartoon from Geek and Poke under creative commons license

by Gunnar Engblom March 11, 2009 10

Twitter for birders part 2. Rare Bird Alerts with Twitter

Twitter, hashtags and RSS feeds.

Last post in the Twitter for birders crash course was about the traditional uses of Twitter. It may still be a bit difficult for birders to really understand the potential here, but make sure you read the previous article first and sign up for a twitter account prior to trying to understand what this post is all about.
In the present post, I will concentrate on the functions that shall become a revolutionary tool for birders. Hashtags and RSS feeds. These terms will be explained later in the text below.
First of all I must mention that I am having a few problems in different platforms. What worked best for me is using Mozilla Firefox web-browser and https://twitter.com with Power Twitter plug-in. Therefore, do consider to download Mozilla Firefox. While, you may read through this manual and test for hashtags without a Twitter account, it is highly recommended that you do sign up for a Twitter account before doing any testing and also download the Mozilla Firefox Power Twitter plugin for Twitter. This is a great plug-in, making the Twitter.com interface more user-friendly and adding a series of features such as short url and the ability to demask the links sent in a tweet so you see what they contain. I also noted that it is the fastest of the available hashtag readers. More on that later.

Twitter on your cell phone

As I mentioned in my earlier post you can twitter from your phone. To do so you have best to upload a Twitter client. There are different apps for different phones, such as Twitterberry (for Blackberry Phones) or Twitterific or similar for Iphones. For other phones check for applications on the twitter app page for mobile phones. With such an application you will be able to use your phone to tweet out a message when you are actually in the field birding at the same instance you are doing the observation, providing you have coverage where you are.

Hashtags for birders.

I think by now you are slowly grasping the idea that real time birding information like this can be very useful. But what if you are 2000 birders in your state or 10s of thousand birders in a country that are tweeting out real-time birding observations? If you would be following all these people, apart from the bird observations you would also get some 5-10 times more general messages that relates to things like “I am having cofffee“, “I am going to the dentist” and “I just ran 5K and feel totally exhausted“…

So how to just recieve the messages you are interested in? Can you select what you want to get information about? Yes, you can! With hashtags – words that are marked with # – can be searched for by automatic RSS feeders. (I don’t know what RSS is either, but it works! RSS means Real Simple Syndicate – which is just as difficult to understand, so let us content with that RSS catch web-page updates and have them transfered to another location such as a blog or an RSS reader)

With hashtags you can get messages from all people on Twitter that use the same hashtag. You don’t need to follow any of them, but can still get all their messages that are related to the thing you are interested in.
Test this:
1. Enter https://twitter.com
2. In the search box type #birding and press enter.

How about that…? Pretty powerful, huh?

So say that all the people in birdclub or the list server joins Twitter and promise to put a specific #hashtagword that is identified with for specific purpose.

I intend to send a link to this blog to some chosen list-servers to test the functionability of this idea. To make it easier for you to see how it can work for you, I have already created some hashtags for birders that you can use.

Testing Hashtags for birders.

First of all, some credit is due. Dan Thalmann, sent a message to KSBird-L – Kansas birding listserver – mentioning how Twitter can become useful to birders and that hashtags should be used to mark specific regions. He suggests #ksbrd for birding in Kansas.
Maybe we should seperate between actual birding news in general and rare bird alerts in Kansas. Therefore let’s create two codes.
#ksbrd – for general birding, as well as activities that are birding related such as lectures or announcements for field trips.
#ksrba – for Kansas Rare Bird Alerts. If one particular bird at a location generate a lot of tweets, one may just drop the #ksrba tag, by simply replace it with #RossGull or any #ringing-code.

Here is my list of other test areas.

#ILbrd – for Illinois Birders
#ILrba – for Illinois rare bird alert
#CALbrd – california bird news
#CALrba- California rare bird alert
#TEXbrd – Texas birding news
#TEXrba – Texas rare bird alert
#Masbrd – Massachussets bird news
#Masrba – Massachussets rare bird alert
#FLbrd – Florida bird news
#FLrba – Florida rare bird alert
#CARrba – N & S Carolina rba – for some areas it may be useful to join two states into one rare bird alert hashtag.
#ABArba – ABA birding area rare bird alert
#Rarevine – uncommon birds sighted in the UK – similar to what is reported by Birdguides
#UKrba – United Kingdom rare bird alert – the hashtag is reserved for Mega-birds
#C300x – Sweden rare bird alert

UPDATE: I have added #rarevine to the list above …..which existed before the preperation of this article without my knowing it…

I follow all these lists, so I will make sure that a few tweets are being sent out with the corresponding #tags. Meanwhile, I hope as many as possible will follow the below instructions below to make sure the messages reach your cell phones or set up more hashtag bird alerts for other areas (let me know if you need assistance). After a week of testing, I will make a summery for your list and give the result of the excersize. Then it is up to you to keep it up. I shall set up these systems for Peru if it looks as if it works elsewhere (too few birders in Peru, to start it here….and even fewer who have smart-phones!)

How much does the Twitter based Rare Bird Alert cost?

Rare bird alert systems in the UK can cost as much as over 400 US$/year including the rent of the pager. “This system sounds as it may be expensive! So what does all this cost?”
IT COSTS NOTHING!!! Well, that is apart from your regular cell phone service. There may be older phone-models that will not work. I believe you need a smart-phone, iphone or Blackberry to make it work. Let me know if you are able to set it up for older phones. It is preferable to have free data transfer to your cell phone account, so that is not a limiting factor. You may still join with phones where you pay for data services per byte, but note that in spite that the tweets don’t cost much at all (due to their small size), it is the other stuff that is available to you through your mobile RSS reader and the links that people send through Twitter that makes reading web-pages on your phone very costly if you don’t have a plan with unlimited data. The only thing that I ask of you is that you follow me on https://twitter.com/kolibrix as a gesture. You shall be getting updates and lots of interesting birding links in my tweets – and get to know me a little bit…..only to find that I am very ordinary…. (sorry to disappoint you if you had any grander thoughts…). Why I ask you to follow me? It makes me look more popular than I really am! I am sure you understand this is just pure vanity!

Step by Step: How to create a Rare Bird Alert system for cell phones through Twitter, hashtags and RSS

1. Create a hashtags for your birding area. I have created a few for you already ready to use. I created these by just sending a tweet containing the word. Previously, you had to follow https://twitter.com/hashtags in order for your hashtag to register, but I believe this is not necessary now. Anyway, I sent my hash-tags through Tweetdeck. Make sure the hashtag is both short and descriptive at the same time – and it has to be unique. There is no limit, you may set up a hashtag for any particular area you think needs singling out, the key issue is that all user use the same hashtag for the same purpose. Therefore, it is likely that list administrators or bird-club boards decide which hashtag to use.

2. I presume you already have a smart-phone, Blackberry or an iPhone. You need a phone that can recieve and transfer data.

3. Install a Twitter client on your phone so you can tweet and recieve tweets from your phone. There are Twitter clients also available for more basic phones. I use Twitterberry for my Blackberry (see above).

4. Install an RSS reader on your phone. While you could use the mobile version of for instance Google reader, for which you have to make sure you have data connection every time you want to look at the hashtag feed, it is much more useful to have an RSS reader that download the feed to your phone, so you can read the message containing the hashtag at any time even on a plane or in the subway where you have no connection. I have found a great such application for smart phones and Blackberry called FreeRange Reader. Download it to your phone by directing the phone’s web-browser to https://mwap.at and set up an account (it is free!).
If you use iPhone, you may try Net Use Wire for iPhones from Newsgator. Please comment below how it works.

5. Create the RSS feed for your hash-tag. This is best done in Mozilla Firefox browser and Power Twitter (see above). For some reason in Internet Explorer with Twitter.com it does not work. You create the feed by searching for your hash-tag like in the example above for #birding. In the right column at the bottom, there is an orange button – saying “RSS feed for this query“. Click right and chose “copy link route“. Login to your RSS Feeder account, you created in the previous step. In FreeRange reader open “manage feeds” and paste this route where you are creating a new feed. You have to put your newly created feeds into a folder. You may want to create a folder specifically for your birding feeds if you subscribe to many. You may even set the RSS feeder so it checks for updates every so often and makes a little beep if there is a new feed. If you only use the RSS feeder as a bird alert gadget – it will be just as any bird alert device. Congratulations! You have just joined a rare bird alert system that will not cost you a penny. The members of the network through the listservers or forums they use, would together set up the guidelines what shall be included in the tweets.

To make the rare bird alert even more efficient, you could include a map and directions from Google maps.
This long Google map link indicates where a Glaucous Gull was seen in California the other day
https://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Petaluma,+CA&daddr=38.253542,-122.629116&hl=en&geocode=CV07wYblTw7IFdiVRwIdbdWw-A%3B&mra=mi&mrsp=1&sz=18&sll=38.253608,-122.629459&sspn=0.001643,0.003181&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=18

and it becomes https://bit.ly/xUmE1 when using Tweetdeck to shorten the url. This short url fits with the message. This shows that the 140 character limit can be expanded this way to include links, fotos and other useful information. Very useful!

Last, but not least. It is likely that you will find, just as I have found, that the FreeRange Feeder is such a fantastic RSS reader that you will want to load it with interesting magazines and news you want to follow. Now is when you need that plan that includes unlimited data!!
Check this FreeRange Feeder page for two tutorials that explain how the possibilities of this mobile RSS reader. It doesn’t mention the bird alert system of course!

Follow me on twitter and let me know how this is working for you.

Twitter button by Mark Panell – Creative Commons license

by Gunnar Engblom February 28, 2009 17

Facebook for birders. A beginner’s guide.

Facebook for birders – an introduction

About a week ago I wrote a message to BirdChat email list asking about Social Media that birders use apart from Facebook and Twitter. Did not get any reply on this question, but I got another question instead.

“I’m new to facebook. How can I connect with birders in it?”

I prepared a (quite long) reply to explain how Facebook can be beneficial to birders and sent it off to BirdChat. Thinking about it, it does make a good topic for a blogpost.
First of all I must thank Wren for providing all the screen shots of for this article. She is one of the people behind Nature Blog Network. NBN will feature this manual in their blogging toolbox. I am overwhelmed for this offer. You find Wren’s fine blogging at Wrenaissance Reflections. I suggest you pay her visit!

Manual to Facebook for birdwatchers

I know there is a lot of people out there who are a bit wary of using the Facebook and have a hard time understanding what it is good for. The most frequent comment I get is: “Sounds like a complete waste of time to me!”

First of all, it must be said that Facebook can be used in many ways. You can keep in contact with your closest friends, but you can also use it in a broader sense to connect with other birders in your area, where you are going to spend your holiday etc. There are several groups you can belong to or you may start a group yourself. (There are several groups similar to birdchat within Facebook, to which you can also upload pictures, movies and suggest favourite web-pages).

Info how to set up a Facebook account in books – for free

If you have not yet set up a Facebook account there is great information on “how to” in these manuals available from Amazon. Click any of the two pics below and Look Inside

UPDATE: Jan 13, 2010. The For Dummies title is surprisingly updated with edition from November 2009.
You can look inside the books on Amazon on the option on the left on top of the picture of the book. Read the index of each book and then “search” for the page you want to read. I am sure you shall find how to open a Facebook account and how to set your privacy levels. You shall find a lot of good tips in doing so, and it will help to get you started.

You can use this technique to look into a lot of books on Amazon without buying…!! I posted a post on my blog about how to use Amazon.com to read all types of books about social media (a collective term for Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Flickr, etc). DISCLAIMER: Just so you know…I have used affiliate links to Amazon through-out. If you do decide to buy, you will be supporting this blog with around 4% of your purchase for beer money ;-D

I also posted a blogpost regarding Google Books, which is another online service that makes it is also possible to read substantial parts of books online. There is a link to my collection of Social Media books on Google Books.

Enter www.facebook.com now and start signing up. It is easy.

What about privacy on Facebook?

Privacy issues are often the one thing that worries new users the most, and learning how to set the settings help a lot. If you are to share with a lot of birders who are not your “real friends”, then you may be careful what you put on your facebook. In my case, having a birding related business, it is in my interest to connect with as many birders as possible (birders talk with birders and if the word “birds in Peru” comes up…there is good chance my name will be mentioned), and therefore on my account you shall find all types of contact info. This may not be your cup of tea, so you may want to set your privacy differently.
As a result – and I guess it is from my generous privacy settings – the other day I got a mail from an old girlfriend that I have not heard from in 30 years!! (I have not decided if I should reply. I didn’t reply). It shows you, that there may be things you might want to leave in the past. On the other hand, I have connected with some friends I went to High School with…which I do enjoy a lot.

To connect with other birders on Facebook.

First of all use the Facebook feature that imports all your contacts. This could be either contacts in your Outlook or similar, or your contacts on your email account in Gmail, Yahoo, Msn, Aol, etc.

You will have to give your email password in order for Facebook to import. There should be no risk in doing so, because it is an all automated encrypted process. However, if you feel uneasy anyway, enter your email account and temporarily change your password, and let Facebook upload your contacts with this new password and then set it back afterwards.

To start with connect only with those contacts that have a Facebook account. Later you can add invitations to those contacts that still lack Facebook and you will have to go through the same process you just did. But, you can opt out from this option to start with. Get used to Facebook, before you start sending invitations to join Facebook. When you do start sending invitations, do select each contact manually and don’t click on add all, because it is likely that you will be adding the email of many of the birding list servers you belong to. You can imagine what it would look like on your birdlist server if everyone was sending out such messages! Nobody likes spam.

You may use facebook’s search funtion to see of long lost friends are on facebook. You be surprised how many are. You find the seach box in the upper right corner. If you search for such a rare name as Gunnar Engblom it is quite likely you will get few hits and can readily find the one you are looking for.

Facebook automatically suggests people you may know, as FB can see when you have “friends in common”. Add those you know. Others you may want to add if just because they are birders.Click on the picture and click on “add as friend”. Before you send off the friend request CLICK ON “Add a personal message…” and explain in a short note why you are inviting the person as a Facebook friend.

Chances are that he/she will accept your request if you just state that you want to get to know other birders.

In Facebook there are a number of groups.

Naturally, you can join up with as many groups as you like. These groups tend not to be as active as you average mailing groups, but are still nice to sign up to. You can scroll through the members in any group and check if there is anyone you know, share many friends with or anyone in your area you would like to become “Facebook friends” with. This often leads to more active interaction as the news from the people you are friends with show in your timeline, while the groups you will actually have to enter one by one to see the new posts.

What if you get Facebook invitations from people to become friends with people you don’t know?

I usually only accept from those I get a personal message from. If there is no message, I check the profile of the person and if it is obvious he/she is also a birder I usually accept. I usually don’t accept those that are not using their own names, and especially not those that instead of their real name use their business name. For all I know, that is just spamming.

I don’t want to be friends with you!

If you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just don’t answer, delete the message or better still, block the person in settings. The last is probably the best, and I would prefer people who do not want to become Facebook friends with me to use this option, as it assures them that they will not get a repetitive invitations. It is pretty harmless to ask someone to become your Facebook friend, but it can be annoying to get more than one invitation if you have already declined. The point is that the person asking will not get any notice message saying that you declined, and therefore will it be difficult for that person to know if he has made an invitation previously.

People will not get mad with you for not accepting them as friends. The original purpose of Facebook was to connect only with your true friends….though birders have found a wider use for it. You also have the option to write the person asking you to become Facebook friends, telling him/her that you use Facebook only for private use.

Thus, denying someone access as a friend is like saying …this network is only for my close friends and family…which obviously is a very good reason.

Don’t put anything on Facebook, you would not put on your friend’s fridge

Even with a selected number of friends, you may want to be careful exactly what you put on your Facebook. As a rule, don’t expose anything that you would not put on your friend’s fridge! Also know that nobody is allowed to put up compromising pictures of anyone against their will. In fact, this could be a very good strategy to get rid of any pseudo-friends and a get-rich-quickly scheme. Join your pseudo-friends at a party and get completely drunk. Next day after seeing your drunken face on their Facebook – you sue them!

Applications on Facebook

There are a number of interesting applications on Facebook. There is even one for keeping your lifelist of birds called “Birds and Birdwatching”. This is a great little app, that will soon gain more and more followers.

There are also a lot of applications that are a complete waste of time….I am not on many of these…and I still don’t get it, why I should accept to receive virtual flowers to my virtual garden – in the “(Lil) Green Patch” application. Lots of my “Friends” do use this app, which supposedly saves rainforest. I have a hard time seing how! Please explain, anyone!

Update 1: Gwendolen Tee send me a link to an explaination by Beth Kanter regarding Lil Green Patch – a social gardeing game. Apparantly, through sponsors it does generate some money. Also, many worthy causes are being displayed while you play the game. The game donated 138.900 US$ dollars and recruited almost a 1000 members to Nature Conservancy. However, with over 500 000 players logging in daily and 6.8m user monthly worldwide users, my participation is a bucket in the sea. I have 48 “(Lil) Green Patch” request with plants sent to me. Do I have to play this? Can I donate my plants to someone who needs them?

Update 2: Bora Zivkovic of Blog around the Clock (Coturnix in the commment below) suggests also to make a mention of perhaps the most useful of all features on Facebook. The Event application, which you can use to invite friends to special birding events, such as birding festivals, field trips and lectures. This is a very useful feature for the organizers of the events to both get in contact with attendees and get an idea as how many will attend, as there is a response button for the event invitation. Furthermore, for the participant in the event it provides a constant reminder as the upcoming events are featured on the right. Bora has a lot of experience of Facebook and has used it for many different purposes. I think you will find his blog post – the evolution of Facebook – very helpful.

Update 3: This one I actually found myself. If you blog, you should definitely use the NetworkedBlogs application. Just click on the link above to sign up. Then search for blogs containing birding and subscribe to your favorites. In summery, you can use Facebook as a blog feeder and you can also rate the blogs you subscribe to. It is easy to handle a large number of blogs this way.

Joining Facebook about 9 months ago has brought lots of joy. I have better contact than ever with my grown-up daughter. I have connected with friends from the past I lost contact with. And most importantly I am direct contact with hundreds of birders around the world. Some are potential clients – others are not. It is not important. It is interesting to get to know each and everyone – and it is a cool way to connect and interchange bird photos and good birding stories.

See you on Facebook then???
Gunnar Engblom
www.Facebook.com/Gunnar.Engblom
Lima, Peru

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Photo by David Fulmer from Flickr by creative commons lisence

by Gunnar Engblom February 25, 2009 3

Free reader also on Google Books

Birders, sorry to be remaining on the social media topic once again. I hope you shall find something useful here. I will later go through some of these apps and put them in a birders perspective in future blogs.

Yesterday’s blog post was about the amount of information one can find for free on Amazon.com in books on social media and web 2.0. I got a very useful comment from Charles Swift recommending the service from Google books. It is very similar – and it gives also buy options. But has some advantages. You can keep a library of books.
I have set up a link to my Google Books Library with the books I mentioned in my blog.

So if you need social media books in one-stop – my library above is a good place to visit. You find a books on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Blogging and Search Engine Optimization that you can read in large parts for free. Many books are of the ….for Dummies series.
Actually Google is a more user friendly than Amazon.com with the ability to scroll and fast get larger size of font.

Again you will not be able to read the whole book. It is the publisher that limits how much you can actually view. The policy you can find here. In some cases there is a limited number of pages you will be able to read. When you reach the top, you can always switch back to Amazon to complete…or read the topics you are interested in, in another book treating the same topic.

I found a few differences. On Amazon you can usually read the latest edition. For instance Weller’s “Marketing to the Social web” shows with the 2009 edition on Amazon, while on Google Books shows 2007 edition. Considering, the fast changes on the net, it is needless to say – the later edition the better.

Other books you can’t find at all on Google Books. For instance “Problogger” by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett of Problogger you can only find to read on Amazon.

I really like the ProBlogger guys…and follow Darren Rowse on Twitter – twitter.com/problogger. He gives away a lot of good tips and share links. The guy has 38810 followers. Here is the Problogger website. The underscore ttitle of their book is “The Secrets for Blogging your Way to a Six-figure income”. I wished!
But that utopia apart, the book is full of common sense and great tips to keep your focused on providing stuff that can be useful to your readers. I think there is a big void of information to birders about the potential of Social Media – and this is what I aiming to provide some tips about on coming blogs. Naturally, I will also be blogging about the birding. Please consider following this blog by clicking the RSS feeder in the side bar of the blog.

Icon: from Flickr – creative commons lisence. Tobias Eigen

by Gunnar Engblom February 24, 2009 9

Read “Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, SEO – for Dummies” for free.

Amazon reader makes it possible to read for free.

In my last post – my top10 list of birding web-sites, I started out mentioning that the Web-gurus frequently use top lists on different subject, such as social media and web 2.0 subjects such as Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, blogging, Search Engine optimization etc, in order to catch attention and to provide something immediately useful. I list these lists examples here again as one of the links was broken, just to make the point.

Ending that blogpost I put 5 books on these subjects from Amazon.com. When checking out each book on Amazon, much to my surprise I could read substantial parts of the books.

This is how I was to read the most essential parts without paying a cent. Clicking any book you get a page that shows the book, price, reviews and naturally how to purchase it. On the left above the picture of the book it says “Look inside”.
Go ahead – click away, you have nothing to loose.

Open the table of contents and go through which part you would like to read. If you have a large screen it is a good idea to open yet another window, so you can have the index handy at all times. In your second window you enter the page number – just the number – in the search box. If the page is available for view it will be clickable. You can read a couple of pages of content by turning the pages on the left or right of the screen. Once you finished these pages, put in a new page number in search to continue reading.

I don’t know yet, if there is a limit of pages viewed per book per day, there may be, and Amazon would be able to track the users based on their IP. I suggest to go slow and only look at the pages you really want to read. Please comment, if you find any such time/page-limits.

It will not be possible to read the whole book, but after some initial testing it seems to me that between 60-80% of the book content is available in most cases, maybe more. In the end it is up to the publisher how much of the material he/she wants to be available this way. Why the hell would Amazon let the users be able to read such a major part of the book this way without paying? Behind this concept is much of the philosophy that you actually sell more books if the users are able to look inside them. That is why there still are bookstores around in spite of Amazon’s cheap prices. Looking inside the books this way, is Amazon’s way responding to the “real” bookstores advantage to let their clients see before they buy.
So what if the sections you really wanted to read are not available for view, does this mean you have to buy the book to find out? No, not at all, simply pick up another book on the same topic and search for the same stuff. In the search box you can also enter keywords to search for. Below follows some more books on Amazon in the carousel on the same or related subjects. Feel free to go click-crazy with no obligation of buying. Read, read, read! All for free.
Having said this, it would not surprise me if some of you guys end up buying anyway. If you do, please send me a pdf of the missing pages (hehehe!). Happy reading.

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