Ideas - Brain Dump

I've had a number of birding related ideas recently and wanted to get them down on 'paper' while I continue to ruminate on their merits and the possibility of getting them off the ground or crowd-sourcing them.

1. Birding League - Stemming from my sports background a birding league that would meet at a specific location 1 or 2 times a month or more in migration season and bird locations in a league format. Incentives like target birds for extra points, rarities, etc...

2. Birding Location Blog & Map - An updated version of Kim Eckert's book that would be eventually crowdsourced in a Wikipedia style compendium of birding. The site pages would go into deeper detail on how to bird the locations, parking, driving, personal conduct protocol, etc...

3. Video Location Blogging - The idea would be the above, but in a YouTube channel instead. So birders could watch GoPro style video for getting to a location, birding the hot spots, understanding where to find target birds, names of sub spots and locations. This could be really fun with some nice video editting equipment, etc...

4. MN Rare Bird Twitter - A feed designed to tweet out rare bird sightings around the state. Might use eBird results, but also MOU, FB, etc; As a collection point with fast turn around for retweet. Would need to define rare and keep to that program. Probably birds like Common Eider, Golden-Crowned Sparrow, Townsend's Solitaire, Varied Thrush, and Harlequin Duck as opposed to just an out of area Northern Pintail, etc... Maybe this would need a few feeds and you could have tiers or county based twitter feed. Kind of feel like eBird needs to just do this or perhaps I could figure out a way to generate automatic Twitter posts using API of eBird and TinyURL to link back to report forms.

Anyway, just some stuff that has been in my head lately as I think about long term birding projects that maybe I'm positioned to get off the ground as a technology person that loves birds.