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200,000 recordings uploaded.

no ads. no growth hacking. no IPO. no exit strategy. just quality content and worldwide cooperation.

> just quality content and worldwide cooperation.

And cash from the dutch government via the Naturalis museum. And content contributed largely by volunteers.

It's a great project and website, but i think comparing it to a commercial company is very pointless.

unless the whole point is to show there is an alternative to the commercial web, and it is not only wikipedia.
Could you describe the alternative?

Are you contending that the internet should be wholly funded by governments? I'm confused.

I meant this only as an example of a website which provides and creates rich information without participating in the commercial ad-funded system. Some funds do come from the dutch government but the content is provided by volunteers.

If I had a solution to generalize this I would be busy implementing it.

Aargh, CC license but its the attribution non-commercial version, which makes the entire thing useless, as "non commercial" is completely ill-defined. So for example, it is unusable by Wikipedia.
Aren't you stretching things a bit by stating that "the entire thing useless" just because of its license?

I live in a rural area with an incredibly wide spectrum of birdsong throughout the seasons. Strangely, as I've grown older, I'm come to appreciate the sounds of our local wildlife, especially birdsong. Hell I even wake up early enough to listen to "Tweet of the Day" on BBC Radio 4 [0].

I'd say this site is certainly not "useless" for aficionados of our feathered friends.

Also...must everything end up on Wikipedia?

[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s6xyk

Wikipedia was just an example.

And frankly, the birds make these lovely noises, the people who record them should not restrict usage - there is no creative input.

Essentially to make them part of free culture we are going to have to relicense them or rerecord them.

Funny you would mention that. I actually got to that site from a link on wikipedia.
All I get is "Attempt to issue media playback commands, while no media url is set."