Turning Ecoblogging Into Data

Today was a good day for fall migrants. In the walnut tree north of the house we saw a couple of Wilson’s warblers and two Pacific-slope flycatchers.

This is the sort of natural history observation that is common for us ecobloggers to post about. My Spire project colleagues have just released a Firefox plugin called Spotter to help turn the observation into formally-described data. The plugin lets one quickly open up an observation form in Firefox. If you fill the form out, the data gets submitted to the Spire server and in return you get a link to the marked-up data together with a fun little spotted owl icon which you can put into your blog post (see below).

For more information about Spotter see this announcement, and the plugin may be downloaded from here.

Spotter is still a research prototype, and we would love to get feedback about how usable the tool is and how it may be improved. So if you are so inclined, give it a whirl!