Laura and Nate, you two are, as usual, either reading my mind or reaching the right conclusions ahead of me. Based on the number of birders thinking along these lines, I predict big changes in our corner of the web in the not-too-distant future.

And let me second Laura’s invitation to discuss these momentous issues over fancy drinks in a fancy setting. Leave your zip-offs at home!

“I think you and Nathan need to get together and brainstorm.”

Excellent idea Dawn! Nate, you and Dawn (and anyone with both avian and electronic proclivities) are hereby invited to a Birds & Beers with Mike Bergin and I this October. We’ve been doing a twist on the Birds & Beers lately, hanging out at this swank martini bar with a disco ball. Odd location for two birders, but the gin-soaked ideas keep flowing. Funny, that.

Social networking certainly has to come into play with the new ABA, if they are to continue to exist in the techno social media world.

They need people like you who are savvy enough to keep them up to date with the quickly changing world of social media.

There are masses of Bird bloggers out there in cyberspace. Bloggers like to be heard and included and interact.
I already read a birding newspaper of sorts. I use twitter, facebook and Google reader to read what interests me.

ABA could put together something that has good quality content, Headliners,
and add other pages for those photographers, and novice bird bloggers.

I would love it if there were filters that users could use. For instance, if I want to read birding blogs from a specific state or region, I could turn on the filter and read blogs from the area i was interested in.
If i want to know what birds are being seen in a specific area a filter for that.
A filter for bird bloggers that are birding guides, photographers…etc etc.
A calendar for birding events by area.

It would be great to use this portal to make our own home page, where we could add our favorite bloggers and content.

Of course this all put into an app. for iphone and droid.
I have more on my wish list of possibilities.I could go on and on.

Keep brainstorming ..I am loving all of this!
The future of cyber birding is getting very exciting!

RSS feeds are HUGELY significant development in recent years in that they allow aggregation and news to go TO a user, rather than a user coming TO a site. It will be exciting to see where they go from here.

Birding info online has reached its critical mass. Hope to see this happen for birding in a major way.

This is exactly, and I mean exactly, the skeleton of the idea I’ve been tossing around, except the concept I have in mind builds on this aggregator format and offers an opportunity for a handful of front page bloggers to create new content and visitors and commentors to create original material on the side that gets more attention than it might on thousands of toiling blogspot blogs. All of this tied to the greater blog and twittersphere.

I look at DailyKos and the SportsBlog network and see the perfect model for a central hub of the bird blogosphere. But it requires lots of work and attention. The ABA is the perfect organization to do it. But if they don’t, I will, because someone needs to.