Feb 12, 2008
Due to EntreCard employees and/or top users acting like little shits in the comments to this post about similar-but-less–of-a-pita competitor Spottt, Arrington has now banned at least one user from commenting and appears to have all comments containing "entrecard" exiled to the depths of a moderation queue (which my own response was relegated to for a while, but obviously rang of pure and unbiased truth and was approved).
Don’t get me wrong, despite today’s public display of immaturity, I have nothing against EntreCard. They are pretty damn useful for people who have some spare time and don’t mind exploring lots of blogs. And right now, that’s just not me.
So how did my EntreCard experiment go? Here’s a screenshot of my stats:
I visited 151 sites, received 161 clicks (18 of which were from my paid ads), and sent out 45 clicks to other sites. I have seen an increase in comments, but mostly on my EntreCard related posts. My EC worth has been going up faster after moving from the more densely populated Internet category to Fashion (making tech "look good"…hey, it could work), but I don’t want to position myself that way other than experimentally.
Verdict: You get out what you put in, and my time is now more scarce than my money.
About the author: Lisa Brewster is a project manager-y web type person in Sunnyvale, CA. Subscribe to this blog by RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter for more updates.
Feb 8, 2008
Today I decided that having a perfectly accurate timeline in my flickr photostream really doesn’t matter as much as I originally thought it did. I’ve got thousands of future sets on my hard drive that aren’t completely finished (like umm, Defcon 15), but many of them are ready to upload. I couldn’t think of any real gain to sit on them, and I actually ended up realizing that it’s better not to upload giant sets at once.
Think about it…after receiving a notification that you’ve uploaded new photos, people only have so much attention before they’re forced to focus on other tasks. No matter how awesome each shot is in your 500 image set, most contacts will be overwhelmed by the amount of content you just threw at them. Uploading fewer images at once gives people more time to actually notice and absorb your work, which will increase the number of individual views and comments.
So what’s the "magic upload number"? I’ve got my photostream set up for small images + sets, which puts 16 images per page. Right now I’m aiming for 20-25, which gives me plenty of leeway to experiment in the 1 – 2 pages range.
Feb 5, 2008
![This is the third search result for evil businessman, btw. =]](http://www.sophistechate.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/evil-businessman-21.png)
Some feed readers and Google search results display the embedded CSS used in Flickr’s Blog This feature as plain text, obscuring the real content of your post (embedded CSS should be in <head> anyway). Pull it out of Flickr’s blog layout settings and save it in your proper CSS file to boost your validation and SEO karma.
Jan 29, 2008
I’ve always prided myself on not having any sort of advertising on my websites. I haven’t even signed up for an Amazon affiliate account (and I link to Amazon all the time just because I think they’re awesome), which I’ve been told is a naive maintenance of purity. So when Graham Langdon of Entrecard emailed me and offered me some credits and a free shirt if I, uhh…wore their shirt (big surprise), I figured I’d better try them out to see if I really believe in their service before I plaster their logo across my chest (like any other woman, you don’t get access unless you make me happy).
The concept is essentially a link exchange based on a click economy. When you visit other blogs in the Entrecard network, you’re exposed to another blog’s ad, leave your card, and both blogger and visitor earn a point. The owner of the site can browse through who has left cards and make an offer to advertise on them or other sites in the directory. The more cards you get (therefore the more popular you are), the more credits it takes to purchase a link on your blog. I’ve already got advertisements for other blogs displayed in the sidebar, and my ad should get in rotation for other blogs in a few days.
I’m trying this service for about the same reason I joined MyBlogLog…to establish a network and bring in new readers. But unlike MyBlogLog, one of my biggest complaints about Entrecard so far are that leaving cards is a manual process which will lose opportunities to connect (todo: write a greasemonkey script to fix this). This kind of traffic isn’t as high quality as one would get from linking and contributing comments to websites on similar yet non-competing topics, but Entrecard is like a blog dating service…sometimes you just gotta meet someone somewhere.
Ok, I confess I didn’t want to lay down this much insight into Entrecard until I’d had some time to see if they really work, but my thoughts are still complicated with the need to justify my decision to start serving ads. Part of this whole system that fascinates me is the similarity between EC’s (Entrecard credits) and Cory Doctorow’s whuffie economy. Entrecard certainly isn’t post-scarcity, though…since EC’s are a new currency that doesn’t take into account my existing uniques, Page Rank, or RSS readers, it takes a lot of effort to build up enough capital to invest into associating my brand with a quality site, all while suffering in the lower class and selling 125 x 125 pixels of my soul for a mere 4 EC.
I’m giving the service two weeks before I make up my mind to either stick with the service or go back to devoting that extra mental bandwidth to creating good old fashioned quality content.
