BirdSite a catalog of media for birds worldwide
Ideas....
Here's some short-term feedback...I'm sure our ideas will evolve as the site grows:
a) Advanced Search will be great, but I'm not sure it's a high priority since we don't have a whole lot of images yet.
b) Mapping: I love maps and I want to do some cool stuff here when I get the time.
c) General answer: one difference from BugGuide is that for birds, there are a ton of websites out there with species and identification info. So I'm not sure how much interest there will be in trying to recreate that information here. Perhaps our focus should be more on data and less on species information (although I'd welcome discussion on that). Specific answer: Wikipedia has a bird anatomy article.
d) Once we have enough images (see (a) above), this could be helpful. I have some ideas for helping people to ID birds. For example, perhaps we could grab the pixel colors of the primary color of the bird's head, wings, etc. Then there could be some sort of interface where you could say "my bird has a red head and black wings", and matching results would come up. There are a lot of possibilities. For now, I think the best method is simply to post an image to ID Request and let other birders have a look. We don't have so much traffic yet that the images get lost in the noise, though pretty soon I'll need to make some folks Editors and let them move images.
e) Possibly, but see the general answer from (c) above.
f) If there's an interest, I could allow BBCode. I guess spending so much time working on websites I prefer HTML.
Ok, here is a list of what I think would be helpful.
a). advanced search
b). mapping
c). some sort of glossary of terms and/or bird "parts"
d). if there could be some sort of id help so we can try to id our own pics. Not sure how that would work or what it would consist of but I think we need something. How about something like a side-by-side double pane comparison where I could show my pic in one pane then scroll through reference pics in the other pane ? There would probably have to be some way to narrow down what was shown in the reference pane but this way we can compare side-by-side our bird against the reference to try to id it ourselves.
e). what about an "articles" section
f). I know there is html tags and BirdSite specific tags but will there be BBCode also