This is the first of two web sites for bird watchers that I’m reviewing. I’ve been a keen birder since the mid ’80s and part of the appeal is  not only the birds and the excitement of finding something unusual; but also my love of lists and statistics. So I went looking online for tools for birders to record and share their sightings.

First up is www.birdpost.com. This is a great site for recording your sightings, it’s attractive to look at and has some really great features wrapped up in a modern and functional interface. When you log in you’re presented with a page showing your life list in the main part of the page with your recent sightings and a picture of the currently selected bird in the left column.

At the top of the main section are three tabs to show you the:

• List View that shows the species in a list (obvious)
• Image View that shows thumnails of each of your species seen
• Map View, a Google map that can be used to locate where you saw each sighting.

You can add an observation and record basic information:

• The species
• When you saw it (date and time)
• Tags
• Whether it was in flight
• Proximity (10 feet, 100 feet, 0.25  miles or 0.5 miles)
• Notes

Here the site starts to let itself down, note that the only way to include a location is to put it free hand into the tags. More on this later.

Once you’ve added your observations they’re available to add to the map. You do this by pulling down your list of unmapped sightings and clicking a balloon next to each sighting. You can then position the balloon on the map and save its position. You can zoom in and drag the balloon to exactly the position you saw the bird. It’s pretty cool and when you roll your mouse over a balloon on the map up pops the details of the sighting and a thumbnail picture of the bird. Nice!

 Overall the site is a very good piece of work; but it has some short-comings that prevented the site receiving a full five stars. The first of these, and for me the biggest issue, is the lack of location details. When I record a sighting where I saw the bird is important becuase I want to see all the birds recorded at that site, and then roll these sightings up to a wider geographical area. Let me give you an example:

• Birds seen at the site list
• In that town list
• In that county list
• In that country list
• In that continent list
• Global list

So a bird seen, say, at home will automatically appear in my home list, Ballinascarthy list, County, Cork list, Ireland list etc. Birdpost.com has a flat tags structure that doesn’t lend itself well to this sort of hierachy. You have to remember to put every location into the tags for each sighting, it really doesn’t work well.

The next issue I have is with the map facility. This is great functionally; but has one drawback. When you add a sighting it’s flagged as unmapped until you map it. Now if you’re a birder like me you record just about every sighting. So at home I record each species seen each day. However if I enter them all into birdpost.com they’re all flagged as unmapped. Before long the list of unmapped sightings becomes huge and unmanagable. The antidote to this is to map all the sightings; but then the map becomes saturated with every bird you’ve ever seen. There really needs to be an option to discard a sighting from the unmapped list and not map it.

Final gripes. Performance is very, very slow. There’s a lot of AJAX and other Javascript going on and the site really suffers from some pretty awful performance. There’s also a few bugs in the site that will pop-up lists of Javascript errors and debug, though overall the site is stable. I’ve also not found any way to export the sightings so there’s no way to back-up the data.

In summary, a great looking site with some great features; but also some functional drawbacks, some bugs and some very poor performance.

In the past I’ve reviewed Mind Manager – an excellent piece of software for producing mind maps – a tool I that forms part of my daily work flow for information gathering and organizing. However I’ve recently discovered something called "Personal Brain" from TheBrain.com that really takes mind mapping to a whole new level.

The problem I’ve always had with a mind map is that it’s essentially only two dimensional. You start at the ‘root’ node and work outwards in a hierarchy. You can create any number of hierarchy from the centre; but problems start to occur when you want to link from one hierarchy to another. Things start to get complicated and a complex map can be difficult to navigate and locate the information you need.

The Personal Brain takes a more 3 dimensional approach to organizing data. You can link nodes to multiple parents and to multiple children allowing for a network of cross links between information nodes. In addition to linking parents and children you can ‘jump’ create links to other topics. These are links to topics that are related but don’t form part of the current parent / child hierarchy. I guess an example might help:

Here we see my TulligWeather server is a child of Servers; but because it is weather related there’s a jump link to Met Eireann. In practice this makes it simple to create complex relationships between topics and yet make them easy to navigate.

As well as creating the topics you can add notes and attachments to them as well as giving them a type and adding tags. The latter allows you to view the tags as a virtual topic showing you all the topics with that tag. Here’s a shot showing a PHP tag and it’s associated topics.

Full search capabilities and and trail of recently accessed items make locating items in unrelated parts of a map easy. Additionally you can pin major topics to the top of the work area to help facilitate moving around different parts of your ‘brain’.

Personal Brain is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. That last one is a big bonus for me as I’m using Linux most of the time at present. The Linux version does have some features that don’t work like dragging files onto a topic to create an attachment; but for most things there’s a valid work around and I haven’t found anything that I really couldn’t do. There’s 3 versions available; free, Core and Pro. The free version has quite a few restrictions; but should still be usable. The Pro version includes integration with Microsoft Office, integrated calendar and a number of other useful features; but is very expensive at $249. I’ve been trialing the Pro version which is die to expire in a few days. Due to current financial constraints I’ll be switching to the free version at that time and I’ll let you know how that works out.