According to Slate:

The bird-watching site, Birdpost, looked like the most promising new social networking site debuted at TechCrunch50, the Sundance of the Web start-up world. Birdpost's target audience is less narrow than you may think: There are 18 million birders in America, and they spend $32 billion each year on their pursuit, according to the company's founders. Birdpost allows users to share data on where they've made their finds. If I'm birding at Lake Dell Valle in California and spot a bald eagle, I'll add the bird to my Birdpost profile. (I can do it from my computer or my phone.) If you've been looking for a bald eagle, you'll get an alert telling you where I've just spotted one. Birdpost also has a way to make money—it's free for now, but it'll begin to charge a subscription fee once it attracts many users.

Now, my questions is, why do this over eBird? Has anyone tried both and have a comparison? I'm curious to see how this is going to further affect birding listservs. I've already noticed a difference on one of the Minnesota birding listservs. Hardly anyone posts to that particular list anymore (apart from rare bird alerts) because members of the list take it upon themselves to post back channel emails to new people who post sightings of palm warblers (that's not rare enough) or to photographers (quit posting links to your photos, you're only trying to make money off of them), or people who post backyard bird sightings (I pay good money to have the listserv emails sent vis text to my cell phone, you're wasting my money), or bloggers (quit spamming the list, we know you make money per click on your website). On that last one, I'd love to know how a blogger can make money per click--how did I miss that gravy train? Add that to the envitable infighting that happens every few months, I can see why BirdPost looks good.

In other news, Minnesota BirdNerd has filmed the rarely seen, Happy Bird Bander Dance.