Dear WSRS member,

Thankyou for your interest in the blog page of the WSRS website and, more especially, for your interest in joining the WSRS community of bloggers. The envisaged primary functions of the blog are to (i) give anyone clicking on our site an insight into the wealth and breadth of activities carried out by WSRS members and (ii) to allow existing members of WSRS to get more of an idea of what fellow members are up to.

As a member, you will know that the Society values the Sound Magazine (SM) and its Journal, Wildlife Sound (WS), very highly. I doubt there is anyone who would want to see the blog compete with either of these publications. So the blog, as least in its formative stages, has been limited in length and the sound clips and images associated with it are also limited. The intention is that the blog should be wide-ranging in content so that it gives a broad view of the range of activities carried out by WSRS members. However, to ensure no competition with the SM and WS text will be limited to 700 words with no more than 4 sound clips each of no more than 20secs.

The ideal would be that the blog will cross-fertilize the SM and WS so that fuller articles based on blogs subsequently appear in the SM and WS and vice-versa. There is no obligation to submit articles to either publication unless you so wish.

As stated above, the blog will hopefully be a wide-ranging series of posts. However, as the blogs will be on the public-facing section of the website, we need to demonstrate that we have appropriate procedures in place to ensure that nothing in the blogs reflects poorly on WSRS, and also to ensure that the text length and sound clips fall within the set limits. For that reason, the blogs will be ‘moderated’ before they go live. Thus, there could be a few days delay before each posting goes live following its submission to the website. Comments posted about the blog will be reviewed before they go live. This is more important as the comments could come from anyone in the world. The facility to post comments will be reviewed regularly in case any problems arise.

To protect your identity, you may decide to use a ‘nom de plume’, but this is not compulsory. The reason for anonymity is simply to prevent anyone who reads the blog from identifying an individual and targeting e.g. their home for theft.

To apply to join the WSRS community of bloggers, please click here to contact the webofficer.