Archive for May, 2008
Written on May 31st, 2008 by Lee Doyle
10,000EC contest!
5,000 TEST Contest
This is a simple but crazy contest. Here are the simple rules:
- The sentence started off in English
- It was then translated into another language (You find out which) using Yahoo! Babel Fish
- It was then translated back into English from the same selected Language
- Then it is posted here for you to work out the original exact sentence.
- The winner will be the first person to post the original sentence used in the translation.
Simple right? So 10,000EC should be yours? Then get working it out!
“I edge up with this crazy idea from has radio operator show young stag in England. I hope to give away more future appropriations in the.”
This first TEST is for 5,000EC. If it all goes ok and I have interest I will post the question for the 10,000EC!
Written on May 28th, 2008 by Graham
Wordpress is now officially five years old, and to celebrate they had a big bash in San Francisco last night. Here’s a picture of me and Matt, the Wordpress founder, celebrating in San Francisco!
Matt, and Wordpress, and the whole Automattic team picked up the tab for an open bar. Thanks! Matt is a really awesome guy. At 24, he’s just two years older than me, but he’s been working on Wordpress since he was only 18. Now, five years later, over 3 million blogs are hosted on Wordpress.com, and he estimates another one or two million are on self hosted installations of the Wordpress.org software. This actually surprised me -before talking to him I estimated there to be more self-hosted installations.
They say the tipping point for Wordpress was when their competitor, MovableType, started charging an arm and a leg. Did you know that MovableType’s cheapest installation package costs $300? No wonder people started turning to Wordpress in droves.
Wordpress.com continues to show incredibly remarkable growth.
I look at this graph and I see the future of media, the future of publishing online, and the future of blogging. Wordpress, Blogger, and the other players are the “newspaper printers” for the entire internet. The thing is, the bigger blogging gets, the more blogs that are created, the more intense the competition becomes for traffic and audience. Of course, that’s where Entrecard comes in.
Talking to Matt really made me wonder where Entrecard might be in 5 years. There are over a hundred million blogs out there, and we’re going to see Entrecard widgets on at least a few million of them. So many bloggers I talked to last night are looking for a way to build an initial audience when they start a blog, and I know of no better way to do this than Entrecard. I wish I could go into what’s in store, but Phirate and I have decided it’s best to not spill the beans on upcoming expansions. Suffice it to say that the future is looking so bright for Entrecard, as an advertising medium, a discovery tool, and a marketplace!
Want to see Entrecard on Wordpress.com?
WIDGET REQUEST FORM
Wordpress.com does not allow javascript widgets on their blogs, but they make exceptions if enough people request it. If you are one of the many people who want to see Entrecard enabled on Wordpress.com, please use this form to let them know!
Written on May 27th, 2008 by Graham
A few people have wondered if I ever made it to California, and where Entrecard is headquartered right now. Well, wonder no longer! Entrecard is now headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, about a half hour south of Silicon Valley.
Here is a photo of my new office:
Through the back door to the porch you will notice palm trees. What you can’t see is the view of the ocean we have. The surf boards on the back deck provide fun and exercise when I’m away from the computer.
This is what the scenery looks like outside my apartment:
Hiking is a hobby thoroughly enjoyed by the EC Team. Here is a nearby waterfall I visited at Big Basin, the first state park in California:
Finally, here is an entertaining photo I snapped the other day, on my street:
(look closely at the driver of the truck 
)
So yes, Entrecard has set up shop in Santa Cruz, California. We have a lot of great stuff in the works that I can’t get in to, so stick around because things are about to get very interesting.
Oh, and PS. If anyone is going to be at the Wordpress Birthday Party in San Francisco tonight, Entrecard will be there so make sure to say hi!
PPS: I was in the TransAmerican Pyramid in San Francisco the other day, meeting with some Venture Capitalists. This was the view from the 24th floor:
The little island just to the left of the lightouse-looking building is Alcatraz. No sign of Sean Connery though
Written on May 26th, 2008 by Graham
I have to get something off my chest right here and now, and that is that Unique Blog Designs is awesome. Let me start from the beggining.
Only a few people here will remember the early days of Entrecard. I’m talking about back in November, before Entrecard had a blog, before Entrecard had a marketplace, before our widgets were found on John Chow and ProBlogger. Back when Phirate and myself were just two guys, halfway across the world from each other, with an idea for a free ad network just for bloggers.
We launched at the Blog World Expo, as many of you may or may not know. At that expo, I met a guy named Nate Whitehill. He was the owner of a company called Unique Blog Designs. The first thing I noticed is that this guy was up on the industry. We had a conversation about Marchex and the infamous domainer from whom they purchased a few hundred thousand domain names for a few million. I have an immediate respect for anyone who is up on their industry info and can carry on a conversation about it. When I looked at the Unique Blog Design business card that Nate handed me, I saw that they owned the domain name blogdesign.com. Now, I have dabbled in domaining a bit in my day (I think I currently manage roughly 150 domains) and I have an eye, and a respect, for an amazing domain when I see it. Blogdesign.com is a bad ass domain name, and will probably be worth at least a million bucks. Good job Nate!
When the time quickly came for Entrecard to have a blog, Nate and Unique Blog Designs were right there to offer their services to me. I gotta say that they made me feel like a VIP. They designed the Entrecard blog for me, and they did one hell of a job. This was before Entrecard was huge, mind you, and that says a lot about the good will of the UBD company in general. What was really nice of them though, was the fact that they didn’t charge me. Talk about a company that knows how to network!
Finally, you may notice a fancy little e-Book graphic on the side of this blog. Yes, that’s right, more UBD handy work. When we launched the e-Book, I quickly realized we didn’t have a graphic for it and emailed Nate in a panic. He whipped one up for me immediately and saved the day.
So, to Nate and the entire team at UBD, thanks for being the best out there, both in your skills, your good will, and your flexibility. You guys are a stand up team. If there are any Entrecarders out there that want a best-of-the-best blog theme designed, and want to work with the best team for the job, contract their services. You will NOT be disappointed.
*Note: I wish I had a photo of myself with the UBD team from the ‘07 Blog World Expo. Sadly, I’ll have to wait until the ‘08 Blog World Expo to get that photo.
Written on May 19th, 2008 by Graham
Hello Entrecard Members,
We’ve just made a ton of HUGE updates to the site, and so we have a lot to announce!
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ADD MULTIPLE BLOGS TO YOUR ACCOUNT
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Today we rolled out a feature everyone has been asking us for since we launched:
the ability to add more than one blog to an account!
Starting today, you can add all your blogs to Entrecard simply by going to your Dashboard and clicking “Linked Blogs” in your Dashboard navigation.
You will be able to choose whether to link your account with another EXISTING account, or to register a NEW BLOG with Entrecard, and automatically link it to your account.
You can switch from one blog to another, and drop or advertise as either one, from the very top right of your Entrecard screen. Where your email address is displayed there will be a link to “switch” to another account of yours.
Add just one more blog to your account, and you’re automatically entered to win 15,000 credits!
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ENTRECARD OFFICIAL E-BOOK
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http://entrecard.com/static/entrecard_official_ebook.pdf
Our free ebook has arrived for everyone to download! If you’re new to Entrecard, and wondering what to do first, this E-Book will guide you along the way. And if you’re an intermediate or advanced user, it’s packed full of strategies you can use to get the absolute most from our service. Download from the link above.
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BLOG POST CONTEST – WIN 2000 CREDITS!
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We are holding a contest to help us spread the word about our “add new blog” feature and our new E-Book, so anyone who posts on their blog, mentions our new “add a blog” feature, and posts a link to our new E-Book on their blog wins 2000 credits. Just leave a comment on this blog post with the link for us to see.
Credits will be paid to all winners on June 25th
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MULTI BLOG CONTEST – WIN 15,000 CREDITS!
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We’re giving away 15,000 credits to people who add new blogs to their accounts. We will randomly select one winner in each of the following classes:
2-5 blogs in account
5-10 blogs in account
10-15 blogs in account
15-20 blogs in account
20-25 blogs in account
We’re giving away a total of 75,000 credits, as there will be one 15,000 credit winner for each class. All you have to do is use our new feature to add Entrecard to your other blogs, or simply link your other blogs together using the “switch” button in the top right of the site. Winners will be picked on June 25th.
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NEW HOMEPAGE
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If you haven’t been around in a while, then you haven’t seen our new homepage! It automatically posts links to YOUR posts, every time you update your blog. You can also use it to see in real time what Entrecarders are talking about on their blogs!
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NEW CAMPAIGN PAGE TABS
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On your “Campaign” page we added quick jump tabs to easily see the Most Popular, Newest, Cheapest, and more at just the click of a button. The “Search” tab on the end of the campaign navigation will bring you to the browser that you are currently familiar with.
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TOP DROPPERS RSS FEED
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The people who visit your blog more frequently than any other members are known as your top droppers. We just created an RSS feed, found on your “Statistics” page, that will allow you to subscribe.
Whew, so that’s what we’ve been up to. We hope you love our new E-Book and find it incredibly helpful. We also hope our new features make things easier for you, make you’re Entrecard efforts more fruitful, and all these new features are designed to help you get MORE traffic, MORE exposure, and MORE value for your blog and your time. Don’t forget to enter our contests by adding other blogs to your account, and posting a link to our new E-Book!
Entrecard Team
http://entrecard.com
Written on May 18th, 2008 by phirate
We have a minor outage coming up at 10:45pm (click for more timezones), probably only about 5-10 minutes but there could be small follow-on outages (after-shocks?) depending on how it all merges in. This is a feature release, please check the support forum in the event of problems.
Outage complete: no serious problems encountered. I am full of joy.
Written on May 12th, 2008 by Graham
Esteemed members of the blogging community, I am proud to announce that today marks an honorable step forward for us all.
For as long back as columnists have been writing articles in newspapers, comics have been along side them every step of the way, giving daily readers a little entertainment and a little laugh, a little food for thought and above all, just a little break from our own lives.
Today, it is no secret that newspapers are dying. Their advertising revenue is drying up as advertisers spend less and less on print, and more and more online. Their staffs are shrinking. Many are facing either bankruptcy or firesale to major conglomerates. And though blogs have bravely stepped forth to replace their predecessor the newspaper, more so by the hands of fate than anything else, one member of the family has been noticeably absent from the party.
Not present on our blogs’ is the comic. It is true that we all grew up with the comic. It gave us a laughs on Sunday morning. It provided a brief distraction during the workday. The comic says in two frames and ten words what a blogger says in 450. You may have thought that comics were dying out as Newspapers fade into obscurity, but you are wrong. Comics are thriving online. Dubbed “Webcomic” these creative endeavors are sprouting up all over the internet, and are already mainstream in Europe and Asia. I can’t help but feel that it is my duty, with the representational voice of the blogging community that Entrecard has given me, to announce the arranged marriage of the Blog to the Webcomic.
After all, throughout history, next to every great column has been a great comic. Bloggers, I urge you to proudly approve these artistic works, these gems of creativity, to take up daily residence on your Entrecard Widget, and by doing so offer your readers the same laughs, distractions, and escape from daily life that comics have offered us for over a hundred years.
Webcomic artists, I welcome you to discover all that Entrecard has to offer you in your quest to find readership for your comics. I hope you find us to be a truly rare and amazingly useful opportunity to promote your comic. What we are offering you is thousands of blogs you can advertise on for free, and thousands of bloggers you can promote yourself to via dropping, not to mention the wonderful blogs you will discover in the process.
By the power invested in me by the state of California, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may have your honeymoon in our luxurious forums.
This comic, for example, is Li’l Nyet, a humorous political comic aimed at the erosion of democracy under Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Find others in the Web Comics category of Entrecard. It’s small now,but it will grow.
Written on May 10th, 2008 by phirate
When building a site like Entrecard, there are dozens, sometimes hundreds of decisions, big and small, that need to be made every day. In general, no one decision is ever the difference between life or death, but the wrong approach will lead you into groups and chains of choices which can be.
It is important, before you get to the point where you’re making these decisions, to try and evolve a larger guiding set of principles to help ensure that – on average – the decisions you make are consistent with your vision of where you want the site to be. Some of these are primarily ethical choices (”I will not lie to my users”), some of them are practical (”I will not implement anything that needs my constant attention”), and of course they will change as time passes and you gain experience. The important thing is simply that they are in place, helping prevent you from getting lost in a sea of detail decisions and losing sight of the bigger picture.
Lets take a look at some of the core principles we try to live up to with the decisions at Entrecard, and some of the side effects.
We will not lie to our users
This is a fascinating one, mostly because the same positives and negatives exist with this as you get in any interaction. Deceiving people is, in general, counter-productive, and you can win a great deal of trust in a market in which players are generally deceptive, simply by being aggressively honest – to the good of both you, and your clients.
I’ve been delighted with how well we’ve managed this overall, especially given a number of tricky scenarios – for example, what do you do when the situation demands an immediate response, but you don’t know the facts? this is often a challenging situation that requires some quick thinking, but the important thing is that the quick thinking should always be with the interests of your users at heart.
Another area that qualifies as a semi-exception is security. Security is as much about deception as it is about solid design, defense in depth is fundamental to solid security and revealing information is counter-productive. At the same time, there is a difference between deception *for* security, and deception *about* security. The first is critical, the second to be avoided at all costs. An example might be the difference between a security system that lets a security flagged user continue to act while silently ignoring their actions, vs saying “Our system is completely secure” when you’re looking at an email with a known security flaw.
We will try and avoid making unnecessary promises
This is a key one, a generalization of the “Don’t announce upcoming features” concept. The problem with an upcoming feature announcement, or indeed any promise, is that you are expected to fulfill it. Failing to do so, no matter how good your reasons, impacts on your trust. In addition, when you have relatively few promises, it is easier to fulfill them in a timely fashion, and thus people can generally come to trust that when you say you’ll do something, it will be done.
This one is hard to keep. It’s so tempting to announce stuff that’s coming up, especially if you’re feeling a little bit like you haven’t released anything interesting recently. It’s also difficult to avoid promising something when someone is having trouble – I’m particularly bad at this, I say I’ll deal with something, and 80% of the time I do, the other 20% of the time something more urgent turns up and it slips my mind. Bad phi.
The bloggers blog is their space, we have no right to say what should go there
I throw this in as an example of something key to our particular niche. While we do have rules about what kind of site we’re willing to have an Entrecard on – something that is necessary to the functioning of the system – we try desperately to avoid any further imposition on the hosting blog. We consider the widget to be a useful guest, not something that is there by right.
This influences a number of our smaller areas of policy, for example we always give our users ways to cancel an ad that is currently showing – the space it’s showing in is on their blog, and therefore it’s theirs to decide what should go or stay.
If you’re currently running, or looking at building, a site – especially a community site – I highly recommend you take some time to sit and think your way through stuff like that. It’ll save headaches later, and it’ll give a consistency to your values that your long-time users will come to understand, making it easier for them to predict your actions in uncertain circumstances.
It’s not about you or the company, it’s about the people you’re interacting with who are taking part of their lives and putting it in your care.
Written on May 6th, 2008 by phirate
We’re having an outage at 10PM Boston time (click for more timezones) (about 30 mins from this post) to resolve the slow-start issues we’ve had over the last few days during periods of the day. We anticipate this will significantly improve the responsiveness of the dashboard and, under certain conditions, dropping. I’ll go into more detail after the outage, gotta get my coding socks on.
update: Since this has been at the top of the blog for a while, just a note that it was completed.
Written on May 5th, 2008 by Graham
I’m compiling information, tips, tricks, and uses of Entrecard for an official Entrecard E-Book. This Ebook will be available for free download on the site. In addition, a link to download it will be sent to all new Entrecard members when they complete signup.
This is where you come in. I want to know from you, the Entrecard members, what sections you think we should include in the ebook? What information is going to be especially helpful to new members of the service? What would you include if you were writing the Entrecard Ebook?
I already have a large chunk of the Ebook done, and it covers all the basics: adding the widget to your blog, anatomy of the dashboard, the credit economy, drops vs advertising, reducing bounce rate, selling in the shop, advertising. You know, the basics.
What I’m looking for, and hopefully some of you out there can help me out, is ideas for topics to cover and expand upon in the ebook that are not “the basics.” These are strategies, tips, and tricks that you’ve found helpful enough that you feel they deserve a section in the official Entrecard Ebook.
Feel free to reply here on the blog, or in the forum. Who knows, you’re section might show up in the official ebook!
