Dear All,

a hot topic these shell clubs. I did not read all but a lot and most
of what was written is right of course.

The main reason clubs get down is because of the raise of the
communication society. Briefly: because of the television and the
internet.

Now, the shell clubs are not the only ones: all clubs, postage stamp
collectors, street clubs etc.... shell clubs are only a dwarf in the
multitude of meetings people used to have before the internet days.
Somebody told me the Belgian government is going to sponsor small
clubs of all kinds, because they all suffer from the same problem.

Again, we are not used to such a rapid change and of course we all
miss the essential human contact "in real" we got through the shell
meetings.

Another violent change we have to deal me as collectors: before 1995
we principally collected WHAT WE COULD GET in our field of interest.
Today, with the internet, we have TO CHOSE WHAT WE NEED In our field
of interest.

Even more than shell clubs, the paper work suffers: all journals are
surviving or died already.


But it is in my opinion wrong to think that interest in natural
history or shells is less. I believe the contrary. Never before so
many people were interested in it and never before the public was so
"informed".

I'll share here some inside information as a positive note: more than
3000 people are registered on our site and get our Visaya-Net and
lists and other occasional news - not enough I know, but we will work
on it.

  There are over 3000000 pageviews a year - one pageview counts on
our counter for half an hour on the computer.   The number of
visitors last year exceeded 84000 different persons ! We estimate
only 5000 of them collect shells - few buy - but I'm sure many of the
newcomers are hooked.

Even the new homepage Poppe-images with general marine Philippine
life got in its short existence of 8 months 17000 unique visitors.

To see the knowledge people have on marine life is proven by the
comments and the way they talk on the gigantic forum for divers and
marine life lovers wetpixel.com

No shell club could generate such interest in the past and I'm
convinced that the number of collectors increases today much more
than it did a decade ago.

Today I live most of the year in a country where the shell club
meetings have vanished (there were meetings for about 3 decades in
Manila  approximately between 1950-1980).

In Europe I used to attend about 20 shell meetings a year, about 15
in Belgium (20 are held each year by two clubs) - and then half a
dozen international ones. I miss of course the "life" contact, and I
still take the opportunity to go to a club when nearby in Europe.
Curiously my attitude has also changed on these clubs: the people
become more important than the shells after all these years.

Best regards, Guido from cold Belgium, very dark here compared to
Mactan.

A Happy New Year to all of you.

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