Web 2.0

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 March 2, 2009 12

Twitter for birders – Part 1. An introduction

Two days ago, I posted a blog called “Facebook for birders“, which immediately became one of my best scoring blogs in just 24 hours. The last 9 months I have together with Facebook also used a Social Media thingee called Twitter. There are still relatively few birders on Twitter, but it has all the potential in the world to become huge among birders. This post is the first part of two, that explains why. Jump right in!

What the hell is Twitter, anyway?

Is it really useful? So you joined Facebook, but maybe you like to keep it more personal and only include the people you actually know quite well as your Facebook friends. Why should anybody except your closest ones want to see photos of your kids grow, meet your parents and grandparents, your aunt and uncles? None of their friggin business, is it? You are OK, because this is exactly what Facebook had in mind originally. Facebook does not want you to make 100s of friend invitations per day to people you don’t know – and you will get a warning for misusing Facebook if you send out this many.
But let’s pretend you nevertheless would like to share with as many birders as possible your bird photos and tales of your latest observations. Are there other platforms? You have may have a blog or you may upload your bird-pictures on Flickr. Most of these observations you made during an out of state birding tour, so your local list server will not allow your postings, as the list is suppose to reflect birding within the state or the county. There is BirdChat of course, but some people will object if you do too many blog post referrals to BirdChat. You would like to reach out to more birders, so you can tell anyone that wants to listen about your latest endeavors, wherever they are. Imagine you could tell hundreds of birders – “hey my blog packed with bird photos from my latest Peru trip is now online”. You would only need a short line like this. Actually, when you think about it, there are a lot of things you could express in just a short line.

The basics of Twitter.

This is where Twitter comes in. Send a message of max 140 characters. Sending short notes regarding your blog or uploaded photos is the first use of Twitter for birders. Before taking this any further, lets watch a video that explains how Twitter works.

This video made by Commoncraft is one of the most watched videos on the internet with over 2.6 million viewers. Note that you can change the settings for subtitles in any language. As you can see in the video, you can twitter about just anything. At first glance the whole thing looks very trivial.

The first reaction usually is:
“I don’t get it. What is all the fuss about?”

Is it really that interesting to learn that someone is having coffee? Can this kind of small talk really have any practical use what-so-ever? Apparantly so, because there are lots of professional that have seen a great potential with Twitter. Rather than providing just trivial messages, the pros look to provide stuff that can be useful to you. It may be news or tips of cool links that will make life easier for you or satisfy a need or demand. Some news can even be read on twitter before it gets out through regular media. The pros who tweet about how to best make use of social media or give tips about Facebook or blogging, have several thousands and even tens of thousands of followers. Twitter is growing very fast and it is clear that it can be very valuable for businesses and entrepreneurs.

If you are birder, many of these small messages will be about birds, and maybe now the whole thing makes a little more sense.

Let’s look at some examples!

Here are some tweets from the people I follow and some tweets that I have made today. I am kolibrix in case you did not know.

smido: One in ten birds could die out as Britain hots up https://bit.ly/TDQVF
BirdGuides: @ratcliffe Welcome back Roger. Did you see anything good? Was it fun??
ratcliffe: @birdingbev Was on Lanzarote, the Canary Islands, writing a travel feature on its amazing volcanos and the artist Cesar Manrique.
Scobleizer: Liked “Facebook’s Thiel Explains Failed Twitter Takeover – BusinessWeek” https://ff.im/1i2dT
Kolibrix: Inserted some screenshots kindly provided by “wren” in the “Facebook for birders” post. Looks much nicer now! https://bit.ly/YS8VX
Kolibrix: Reading a great article: Social Media for Business: The Dos & Don’ts of Sharing https://ad.vu/yp9y
Kolibrix: RT @judykarwacki Guyana Launches World’s First Good Practices Checklist for Birding Tours https://bit.ly/KI8Jc

Some explanations.

Any post starting with @name is a reply to that person.
Any post starting with RT @name is a re-tweet – a forward message to the community of something you have picked up, but maybe some of your twitter friends may not have.
There is also the option to send direct messages to anyone that follows you. Such message is syntaxed D @name

How do I find other birders on twitter?

Though you can use also just the interface on twitter.com to make searches, it is better to use a tool like Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck can be downloaded for free to your computer. With tweetdeck you can group the people you follow into for example, family and birders – and you can make a continous searches for keywords like birding or birdwatching. Anytime anyone among the 4 million people that use Twitter, make a tweet containing the keyword it will show in the time line of Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck also gives the possibility to creat short url:s as you see in the examples above so it is easier to send links and still have room for a message in the 140 character limit. You find the most popular applications on https://twitter.com/downloads and still more apps on https://twitter.com/downloads: some that can be used on your cell phone to check your tweets through either SMS, email or IM. This opens up for an extremely useful device for birders as you can tweet, the same second you are observing a bird, through your telephone.

Do enter https://twitter.com and open an account today. State that you are a birder in your profile, that way you make sure that other birders find you. If you want to follow me you find me at https://twitter.com/kolibrix/

In part 2 of “Twitter for birders” I will tell you how something called hashtags will revolutionize birding and make all bird alert services obsolete in a near future.

Art by Creative Carrot under creative common license on Flickr

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.

by Gunnar Engblom December 14, 2008 1

Blogging by email – birding today with former Vice Minister of Tourism

Blogging by email and networking.

I just set up a super secret email account from which I shall be able to send posts directly to my new WordPress blog on Kolibri Expeditions web-site. I guess this is part of the web 2.0 revolution…even if I got on this train late. Part of this strategy is to use networking as way to get to both potentially new clients as well as keeping in touch with and in the mind of clients in the past. Facebook is one of the best way to do this. My Facebook account is here, if you want to become my “friend” on facebook. In fact, it is not that necessary that we actually know each other. Facebook is a bit of voyeurism, but oneself decides really how much privacy is suitable to post. Some people use facebook strictly privately, while others use it, as I do, to create a new network with people with similar interest. In my case it is birding and specifically birding in Peru and South America. On facebook I have a bit over 200 “friends”. I think the order of some 400-500 “friends” would create a nice network

Twitter

A few months ago I set up a twitter account and made my 200th posting today and have around 150 people following me. You can follow me too at www.twitter.com/kolibrix. Twitter could be considered micro-blogging. You tell the world what you are doing in 140 characters. Though many will just but daily activities such as “I am drinking coffee”, there are many people who use twitter as a fast means of telling their followers about a new blog post or sharing something interesting they have read.

Gunnar’s previous blogs

A couple of days ago I set up this blog. I have blogged before but usually far between. See some examples here:
https://www.birdingperu.blogspot.com/ (English)
https://www.limasafaris.blogspot.com (Spanish)
https://www.birdingperu.com/blogs/

The present blog

This is however the first blog I do on the company page of Kolibri Expeditions https://www.kolibriexpeditions.com. Rather than having my web-master creating a new blogging tool specifically for my web-page, I decided to use one of the free ones available from www.wordpress.com and house it on our server. The people at the support section of my server provider kindly helped to upload the program. It is very convenient and there are already a lot functions and plug-ins available, The main idea is that the blog will:
1. Direct clients to our main part of the web-page. This way, we’d get more business.
2. Get more traffic period and thus better search engine position. With more traffic google ranks the web-site higher
3. Create new material which also helps to get more traffic as there will be more search engine keywords produced.
4. If I get a lot of readers, some online adds, can actually give some revenues at least to partly pay for the housing costs.

Today’s birding at Pantanos de Villa

Anyway, this blog was actually meant to tell you by sending an email that I have been birding with Eduardo Arrarte -the former Vice Minister of Tourism and his lovely wife Lieser today at Pantanos de Villa in an activity that I arranged open to the public. There were also two cultural tour guides that are learning about birding, and two other guys – one of them only 15 years old – that also ae new to birding. Great to be able to inspire new birders. This should be part of the mission of every birder. Share your knowledge.

Birds seen today included:
Peruvian Thickknee
Peruvian Meadowlark
Black-necked Stilt
Osprey
Great Grebe
Pied-billed Grebe
American Oystercatcher
Franklin’s Gull
Band-tailed Gull
Burrowing Owl
and many more.

Gunnar Engblom.

PS: I hope this works!!
PPS: Well, it didn’t. I had to post it the normal way. I wonder if it was because my secret account was an gmail account?

How to credit when credit is due on Twitter?

Desired search fucntions on Twitter.