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| Managing your diary | Mapping your experiences | Collaborating on trip reports | High quality species imagery | Glossy trip reports | Species pages |
Wildiaries is a social-networking application or "app" and currently the engine behind free sites on wildlife. However, it can readily be applied to any nature-oriented websites, even those without a major focus on species. This includes travel, book publishing, schools projects etc.
It was conceived in 2008 as a way help existing environmental website-owners to achieve a social-networking outcome. Although we're inherently social beings, we don't do a very good job of making the most of this online. Most efforts by people to create websites inevitably fail to achieve their full potential.
There is real scope for nature-oriented social-networking and if we're wise, a byproduct would be to promote conservation through shared experiences. Connecting people to a rapidly vanishing biodiversity is one way to persuade millions to care for the environment. It also provides potential for related businesses (e.g. wildlife guides, natural history books, conservation campaign organisations etc) to market and sell through enhanced social-networking.
Development
Over the last year and a half, the application has been built from scratch, using Ruby on Rails, a powerful Web 2.0 programming language. It is stable and secure, hosted on an independent server and backed up daily. With the baseline architecture complete and a working version online, modifications to suit specific networking purposes are straightforward. It is possible to integrate Wildiaries with almost any existing system or website.
Data Sharing Model
Our model is one where the Wildiaries application adds social-networking capacity to individual websites. Wildiaries branding in sites that incorporate the application is not expected to be any more visible than in this site (although this uses the 'free' system - when Wildiaries is fully incorporated, users sign up to your site, so even click-through pages can be in your look and feel).
Users create content and maintain rights over that content - because this is what users demand - but Wildiaries is allowed to distribute the information. So sites using the Wildiaries application get the right to use the data provided by Wildiaries members - even benefiting from the data off other Wildiaries sites. Wildiaries can broker shared-content deals by establishing links using XML and facilitating the use of existing social-networking media (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook) as this benefits those using the application.
Social-networking depends on capacity of others to maintain the quality and quantity of information flowing into the web. Every other website is an opportunity, not a competitor. Two websites with reciprocal service agreements will grow together - if one doubles in size, so does the other. This is how Wildiaries is designed. On the other hand, if you try to stand alone or worse, compete with an established interest, you'll ruin the chance of success for both you and them.
Contact Us
For more information, please email us on wildiaries@gmail.com
