Stray Thoughts

I am writing this sad post today to express my shock and deep disappointed at the actions of well known animal focussed site IrishAnimals.ie over the last couple of days.

Up until yesterday, I had been promoting lost and found tweets from Irish Animals on the website here combining them with those automatically generated from the free  lost and found pet listings on this site via @lostfoundpets, of course giving full attribution and a link back to the original tweets.  I had been doing this via their publicly available feed which they themselves invited subscriptions to on their own site.  As a firm believer in the power of the social web, I believe that the more exposure these listings get, the more the chance these unfortunate Irish animals and their owners have of being reunited.

Unfortunately, for reasons best known to herself at this point, Denise Cox, who runs Irish Animals, appears to hold a different view.  Over the course of the weekend it came to my attention, quite by accident, that our subscription via the @lostfoundpets account to the lost and found twitter stream from Irish Animals has been blocked.  I contacted Ms Cox in an attempt to find out what was going on.  In response Ms Cox sent me a one line email requesting that I discontinue promoting her tweets on this site.

This to me is a situation beyond weird.  We have Irish Animals, a website which, as one of the many services it offers,  invites the public to list lost and found pets for free and public display and in addition  invited subscriptions to its Twitter feed on its own site.  However, when another website, dedicated  to the area of lost and missing Irish pets promotes the Irish Animals lost and found tweets to an even wider audience on its own pages with full attribution and links, Irish Animals summarily and without notice attempts to block that site’s access to their publicly available feed.  One has to wonder what would happen in the event that one of our fans on the Lost and Found Pets Ireland Facebook page were to attempt to share a link to one of our listings on their Facebook page.

If this situation were reversed and Irish Animals were promoting listings from Lost and Found Pets, I would be thrilled knowing that the listings were gaining maximum exposure. Right from day one on the site, I have welcomed and continue to, welcome anyone to syndicate the listings and other feeds I provide here.  If parties interested in the area of lost and found Irish pets can not even see their way clear to sharing data on those pets freely, what hope do we have of ever centralising this data in a well structured, searchable, indexed form which at the end of the day, is what really needs to be done to properly maximise the effectiveness of online lost and found listings.

Now I could speculate until the cows come home on why Irish Animals are adopting this approach (believe me, I have more than just theories) but I do not think that is in the interest of the animals we all claim to serve at this point.   Instead I appeal to Denise Cox to rethink her position on this matter,  to end this anti-social networking and restart the conversation about mutual cooperation we were due to have at the start of this project but which she subsequently postponed indefinitely.

In any case you can all rest assured, Lost and Found Pets Ireland will continue to promote information sharing in this area as we develop the services we offer to lost Irish pets and their owners.