Colnect's PhoneCards Catalogs Exceeds 222,222

Colnect's phonecards catalog, which already was the largest in the world, has continued to grow and now features over 222,222 cards from 229 countries. This means that over 22,222 phonecards have been added to the site in roughly the last 3 months (since our last milestone), a reflection of the dedicated efforts made by our many volunteer contributors. We would especially like to thank the co-ordinator of the phonecards catalog, Ignacio F López Vico [iflvico], for helping to organize all these additions and ensuring that Colnect's phonecards catalog continues to be as up-to-date and comprehensive as possible.



Brazil continues to lead the way in phone cards added to the catalog, with over 60,000 having been uploaded for Colnect collectors to mark in their "Collection", "Swap" and "Wish" lists. Germany and the United States also have notably significant quantites of phone cards on Colnect at more than 10,000 each. With such a dedicated team of volunteers continually supporting us, the sky is the limit for the future of Colnect's phonecards catalog and the site as a whole. If you would like to contribute in any way to Colnect, please don't hesitate to Contact Us.

Collectors Flock to Manage Their Collections and Swap Lists on Colnect

Colnect's popularity amongst collectors has surged in recent weeks, with site traffic reaching record levels and new members signing up at unprecedented rates! For instance, Colnect received an impressive 5,000 visits yesterday (February 22), whereas only 1 month ago we were setting records with a mere 4,000 daily visits. This indicates a phenominal growth rate and should bode well for our goal of developing an extensive collectors community touching every corner of the globe. The number of new collectors has also smashed all previous records, as 48 new members signed up on February 22 alone while 258 registered for that entire week (both records we plan to break soon).



A key reason behind this exceptional progress is likely our recent overhaul of Colnect's layout to make the entire site more user-friendly, attractive, and easier to navigate. These changes have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from long-term Colnect members and new collectors alike, who have responded by using the site more than ever to meet their collection needs. Some credit also goes to Colnect's volunteer translators and their manager, Ben Ulster, who have done an exceptional job translating pages from the site into 47 languages! These translations are an extremely important long-term project that should one day allow collectors from anywhere in the world to use Colnect in their native tongue. If you would like to contribute to Colnect through translations, catalog additions, or have any other feedback, please Contact Us.

Colnect's TeaBag Catalog Surpasses 3,000 Items

Colnect's tea bag catalog has grown steadily in recent months and now features over 3,000 tea bags from 48 countries. Although it's not among Colnect's largest categories, tea bags have developed a significant community of collectors on Colnect to connect and swap with. We would like to commend the hard work of the tea bags coordinator, Carine De Pauw, whose continued dedication to Colnect has earned her the prestigious 3 stars.



If you are a tea bag collector, feel free to sign up on Colnect and upload items from your collection to the site. The current success and future greatness of Colnect rests on the shoulders of devoted volunteers like Carine and YOU.

Colnect Surpasses 8,888 Collectors!

Colnect has reached yet another milestone today, as more than 8,888 collectors from around the world have registered to take advantage of our unparallaled features. This lucky Chinese number follows months of significantly accelerated growth in both new members and catalog items, trends that bode well for transforming Colnect into one of the world's most popular collectible sites. At its current pace, Colnect should eclipse the prestiguous 9,999 collector mark by the end of March. Colnect has also surpassed the 100,000 page view per day (or 3 million page view per month) plateau, illustrating the site's growing appeal to collectors.




Although progress has been quite impressive, this only represents the tip of the iceberg for Colnect's full potential. We have imminent plans to add new categories such as gift cards, create or improve many more languages, and continue enhancing our existing catalogs. With the help of our many volunteers, Colnect will continue giving collectors an unmatched collection experience and reach even greater heights!

In the long-term, we envision a site where collectors anywhere in the world can register and utilize Colnect entirely in their language of choice. However, this goal will only be achieved with the assistance of volunteers around the world. If you would like to assist Colnect in any way, you are always welcome to Contact Us.

90,000 Stamps in Colnect's Free Catalog for Stamp Collectors

Colnect's impressive stamp catalog has experienced phenomenal growth recently and has now surpassed 90,000 stamps, with over 8,000 having been added in the last 30 days! This remarkable progress was made possible by the dedicated support of our many stamp contributors and collectors, who are selflessly adding and improving items in the catalogs every day for the benefit of every member on this site. Colnect is especially grateful to our stamps coordinator, Fabian Eicke, for his tireless work in organizing these catalog contributions and helping to create an extensive database that all stamp collectors can enjoy.



Although we are pleased with these results, there is still much work to be done. If you have any stamps or other collectibles not yet in Colnect's catalogs, feel free to Contact Us so we can include them. Doing this can help you find an appropriate swap with collectors from around the world while also benefiting the Colnect community as a whole. In particular, we would like to include substantial numbers of stamps from a greater variety of Asian and African countries.

Colnect Unveils Dynamic New Look to Improve Collecting Experience

Colnect is excited to launch a brand new layout that is both prettier and easier to use for collectors! One of the most important changes is a greater emphasis on displaying only the relevant category information for a particular collector, meaning that someone who only collects stamps can easily customize their top menu bar to display only pages important for stamp collectors (i.e.: clicking on a collectors' list will show only those who have stamps). This reorganization has become particularly warranted in recent months with the addition of several new, highly-specialized categories that appeal primarily to niche collectors. In addition, numerous smaller modifications have been made that will make navigating the site more efficient and intuitive, such as checkboxes that indicate when an update is in progress and automatic redirects to item list pages. For a complete list of changes, please see the new Face-lift page.



Creating the new version of Colnect entailed months of meticulous design, experimentation, and consultation with collectors. Although adjusting to the new layout may take some time and there will inevitably be some temporary glitches, we feel that the aforementioned advantages will make this project beneficial for the entire Colnect community in the long-term. Please send us any feedback you may have about these changes so that we can continue working to improve Colnect and make your collection experience more enjoyable.

Collectors Visiting Colnect Over 111,111 Times this January

Colnect set new traffic records in January, as over 111,111 visits were made to the site throughout the month, more than a 16.16% increase from December! This milestone reflects Colnect's continued surge in popularity and its strong commitment to expanding the resources available to collectors. January also saw a sharp rise in collector registrations, with a record number of new collectors joining the Colnect community. This recent growth means that 115 countries are now represented by active Colnect members. In addition, the number of Unique Visitors to Colnect jumped more than 17.17% compared with December to over 51,234, while total PageViews increased by over 24.24% to more than 2,727,272. Since Colnect is a unique site, we prefer to use non-round numbers in our reports.

Although this latest news is extremely promising, the development of a truly global community is an ongoing process that requires unyielding effort from both administrators and volunteers. If you have any suggestions or ways to improve the site or would like to help add new items to our catalogs, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are also currently looking for translators to help display Colnect pages in many languages, with the following being of particularly high priority: Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese (especially Traditional script), Hindi, and Punjab.

Colnect Presentation on TechAviv Peer Awards

Colnect is proud to publish its narrow 2nd place finish at last month's Tech Aviv Competition onto Youtube and other video-sharing sites. The video shows Colnect's entire presentation to the hundreds of Tech Aviv members in attendance and clearly illustrates the rapturous reception we received from the audience. It begins with an updated and more comprehensive version of the entertaining video displayed at Colnect's victory in the European Startup 2.0 Competition and concludes with a brief discussion about the company by founder Amir Wald.



Since this competition and the video's creation, Colnect has added even more languages and continued the expansion of its catalogs to enhance the collection experience for our global community. We rely on dedicated volunteers to contribute their knowledge of a particular language or collectible category in a similar fashion to Wikipedia. If you would like to get involved in improving Colnect or have suggestions for new collectibles that should be added, please don't hesitate to contact us.

29 Million Colnect Pages Indexed on Google?

Colnect's rapid growth is being reflected in its presence on the world's most popular search engine, as we now have an astounding 29 million pages indexed on Google! This number is made even more impressive by the fact that only 2 months ago, Colnect's total page indicies were at only about 10% of its current tally.



However, these numbers are quite dubious, as performing a search with Google's Canadian version yields only 1.1 million search results, while others produce page indices in the range of 3-5 million. This begs the question of how exactly Google calculates the quantity of indexed pages for a particular site and if this number has any reliability or basis in reality. Although Colnect has added many new lanugages and categories over the past couple of months that would explain a certain increase in pages, a 10-fold increase over this timeframe seems entirely unrealistic. Only time will tell whether this enormous figure can sustain itself or fall back to a total more in line with past values.

Colnect's Alexa Page Rank Climbs to 83,000

Colnect continues its ascent in the Alexa rankings, as we are now ranked ~83,000 in the site's measurement of total worldwide traffic. This progress is an unsurprising result of Colnect's newest collectible category additions, worldwide community of collectors, and regular catalog improvements.



Although moving up these rankings becomes a more difficult task once inside the top 100,000, Colnect's future growth prospects remain bright and should keep rising in both total traffic and overall page rank as more collectors worldwide become aware of the immense benefits offered by Colnect. In addition, our plans for adding or improving many new languages and significantly expanding numerous catalogs will increase Colnect's global appeal and ultimately our Alexa rank. Feel free to contact us if you would like to get involved in any of these projects and help make Colnect even more useful for our international collectors community.

Colnect Announces Exciting New Partnership with FreshersWorld

Colnect is thrilled to announce that we have formed a partnership with India's most popular students web-site, Freshersworld.com in which the three talented students who will win the competition will have the opportunity of traveling here and interning with us!




The site has launched a new program called "Campus Ambassadors" in which students from Indian universities who demonstrate exemplary leadership skills will become intermediaries between their schools and Freshersworld.com. The selected campus ambassadors will then be evaluated based on both their performance in that role and their previous qualifications, with the winners being eligible for many great prizes. Of these, the 3 Grand Prize recipients will have the opportunity to intern with Colnect in a country renowned for its innovation and technological prowess.

While interning at Colnect, these Campus Ambassadors will undertake a variety of important projects, such as managing Colnect's rapidly expanding global community, improving the web-site's design and functionality to make it more user-friendly, and searching for creative new ways to grow the business. As an on-line start-up, Colnect offers flexibility unmatched by virtually any large companies along with a diverse range of tasks that will provide prospective interns with critical experience in an area of their choice.

Colnect's Google Page Ranks Advances to 5

In an undoubtedly positive reflection of Colnect's impressive growth and development over recent months, Colnect's page rank on Google has improved to an all-time high of 5 (PR5), besting the previous mark of 4 (PR4). With our total collectors exceeding 8,000, 10 collectible categories being made available, and constant catalog improvements, it's no wonder that more sites link to Colnect and that Colnect's status is advancing on Google.

This upgraded page rank will likely mean higher Google search results for Colnect, which should translate into greater traffic, more new registrants, and ultimately an even better collection experience for current Colnect collectors. Given Colnect's current progress, it's quite reasonable to expect future upgrades in its Page Rank as the site becomes more recognizable and well-established on the web. However, this might require extra patience, since moving to a higher Page Rank becomes progressively trickier as the levels increase.

Colnect's Hotel Key Cards Catalog Now Exceeds 2,000 Items

Colnect's catalog of Hotel Key Cards, one of our newest categories, has been growing at a tremendous pace since its launch and has now eclipsed the 2,000 item milestone! Although expectations were high following our most recent category additions, even the most optimistic collectors would probably not have expected such impressive progress over so short a time. This great news means hotel key card collectors will have much greater selection in choosing items for their wish list and in finding suitable swap partners, as larger catalogs make collection management and setting up exchanges even easier on Colnect. "I am pleasantly surprised by the rapid development of our new categories," Colnect founder Amir Wald remarked. "Our long-term goal is to be able to break into every hotel room," Wald quipped. Right now, 75 countries are represented in our hotel key cards catalog, with the largest being Spain, followed closely by the US while Mexico trails further behind.

Colnect's catalogs operate under wiki-like principles, meaning trusted collectors can add their own personal collections onto the site and make any necessary changes or updates. We would like to thank our hotel key cards co-ordinator, Ignacio F Lopez Vico [iflvico], for making these significant improvements possible. In addition, we would like to recognize the following nine contributors, whose collaborative efforts have brought the hotel key cards catalog to its current state: FELIX, Juan, cuevas, motikr, bruun01, minos, fquimbo, Trudyh, and Dijor.

Feel free to contact us if you want to help add items from your personal collection into one of our catalogs or have any new category suggestions.

Colnect Wins 2nd Place in Nail-biting TechAviv Peer Awards Competition

The strength of Colnect was on full display Wednesday night as we captured 2nd place in the TechAviv's inaugural Peer Awards competition, losing by a single vote to worthy champion 5Min. This honour comes at the end of a year in which Colnect claimed victory in the prestigious European Startup 2.0 Competition. Although Colnect came up just short this time around, our video presentation enthralled the approximately 150 people in attendance, with Frognector reappearing to explain the great benefits offered by the collectors' community and its enormous potential:



The Colnect team, led by founded Amir Wald, was gracious in defeat. "Although obviously we would have enjoyed the win, I am ecstatic about our 2nd place finish and how close we came to the top. There is much to celebrate in coming 2nd to an incredible company such as 5Min and ahead of three other extremely worthy competitors in the finals," Wald declared shortly after the voting concluded. Colnect is pleased to congratulate 5Min on its narrow victory and wishes the best of luck in the new year to all our fellow start-ups who provided such intrigue to the Tech-Aviv competition.

Colnect is hoping to build on this great momentum heading into the new year. A newly designed easier user-interface is now under construction. One of the major objectives to add even more collectible categories and expand our existing catalogs for items such as stamps, where many improvements are still desired. In addition, Colnect is looking to further increase the number of languages offered (in full) to broaden our international appeal, with Japanese and Bahasa Indonesian being two examples of translations that are regularly being made more comprehensive.

As always, Colnect would like to thank our extensive army of volunteers who deserve full credit for making these language and catalog enhancements a reality.

Colnect is of The 5 finalists on TechAviv Peer Awards

After three weeks of public and members-only voting, over 100 startups nominated and 6,000 votes cast, Colnect was chosen as one of the 5 finalists to present on the TechAviv Peer Awards.



Colnect has a great presentation waiting, dubbed "The Story of Frognector".

Rather than have a panel of so-called experts pick the winner, TechAviv’s founders and investors will select the winner via live SMS vote after the startups get 10 minutes each on stage to impress their peers.

Wish us luck :)

UPDATE: Colnect took the 2nd place by storm. A new blog post will soon be available but meanwhile you're welcomed to enjoy the video here:

FaceBook vs. YOUR Privacy - AKA Note: Your Friend List is always visible to you and your friends

The Facebook team, after apparently deciding that there wasn't enough excitement to its old privacy settings, made additional changes this week in an effort to appease users who have complained about the amount of their profile information that's available to the public. Ironically (or perhaps deliberately), these modifications mean that users now have even less control over the visibility of certain content to others. For instance, before the changes were made, Facebookers could designate certain "groups" of their contacts who could not see all or part their friends list. However, Facebook now displays a new notification when one tries to modify the settings on their friends list that "Your Friend List is always visible to you and your friends" (see screenshot image). Since these changes were completely unannounced, profile information that some users specifically designated as private and presumably still believe as such are now potentially visible to the public. In the eyes of many, this constitutes a serious breach of privacy. One can't help but wonder if Facebook will soon make other confidential information universally accessible, such as which profiles a user clicks on or messages sent to their Inbox.

This stir has caused some devoted users to seriously question their loyalty to the social networking site. Many have a wide variety of friends on their Facebook list and like to keep their personal and business contacts separate in some ways, such as being able to meet and stay in touch with business connections while simulataneously keeping their list of personal friends hidden from them. With these changes, that is no longer possible.

In addition, the new changes have made it much more difficult to control which types of a user's Facebook activity are automatically published as "News-Feeds" on their wall. As an example, it used to be possible for Facebook addicts to hide the notifications for adding friends and posting on other peoples' walls from being displayed in their profile, whereas now this appears to be impossible. This lapse in confidentiality was discovered by the exasperated Colnect founder Amir Wald when he checked his wall this morning. "Introducing changes that breach our privacy so blatantly and without a warning is nothing less than outrageous" said Mr. Wald, "We would never dream of doing such a thing to our devoted collectors community".

In order to maintain this element of privacy, Facebookers are now required to manually delete each of these notifications one-by-one from their walls, as opposed to the "Erase All" function that was available in past incarnations. The fact remains that users should not have to go out of their way to preserve the confidentiality of information that they previously took for granted, especially when many are not even aware about the automatic changes made to their settings.

These latest developments mark the latest concern with the site for internet privacy advocates. If Facebook keeps making Privacy changes, it needs to ensure that any strict privacy restrictions already established by existing users are not compromised in the process. Otherwise, many dedicated supporters may opt to pull the plug and end up displaying none of their personal information to anyone.

Save Us From Index Spamming / How to Make Google Carry Your Slogan

As the number of internet users and available web pages worldwide continue to grow exponentially, the importance of maintaining a high index on search engines is magnified with it. Consequently, many spammers or special-interest groups wishing to spread a particular message have developed more sophisticated techniques for "cheating" their way to the top of search results. One of these newer methods involves exploiting sites that display a 200 Code for error messages by adding the spammer's unsolicited content into Google's (or another search engine's) indices for the purpose of generating traffic the next time a user searches for that term. For more details about this technique, see this previous blog post on the subject.

However, a more interesting phenomenon is the recent adoption of this method by political organizations and other non-commercial action groups. For example, typing the phrase "Save Us From Berlusconi" (see Image 1) into Google generates countless results in this fashion, evidently a result of the efforts made by individuals and organizations opposed to the Italian Prime Minister to get their message across.





This was brought to our attention after the messages appeared in the search engine indices for the site Transposh. Similarly, these indexed pages can also appear even without a specific search being carried out for them (see Image 2), a trend that has been noticed by the Colnect administrator who reported the problem originally.



This relatively recent spamming method has the potential to undermine the legitimacy of search engine results and consequently make some users think twice before clicking on a link that appears at the top of their results list. Google and the other major search engines need to put a halt to this problem before it becomes even more prevalent and completely compromises the integrity of their search functions.

Over 20,000 Coins on Colnect's Free Catalog

Colnect's free, extensive catalogs achieved a new milestone this weekend, as more than 20,000 coins from around the world have now been published. These continual catalog additions and improvements ensure that Colnect collectors have the widest variety of items to choose from in managing their collections and making exchanges with others. Colnect's catalogs operate under wiki-like principles, meaning trusted collectors can add their own personal collections onto the site and make any necessary changes or updates. We would like to thank all of our volunteer contributors who help keep our catalogs growing and provide the entire Colnect community with the best collection experience possible.

Russia currently features the largest coin collection on Colnect with over 1,000 items, followed closely by Poland at just below the 1,000 mark. Every continent is well-represented with at least hundreds of coins on display.

Postcards - Colnect's Latest Addition

We are happy to announce the launch of yet another category to Colnect's catalogs: postcards. This addition offers our collectors an even wider variety of collectibles to choose from in managing their collections and finding others around the globe to exchange with. It also closely follows last week's expansion into bank cards, hotel key cards, and transportation tickets.



The postcards catalog, which presently features a couple hundred items from France and Germany, was made possible through the dedicated efforts of Paul Giba [CarnivorousVulgaris] . Feel free to check it out if you or someone you know collects postcards!

As always, Colnect is grateful for the continued support of all its volunteer collectors who make these catalog improvements a reality.

If you're an avid collector in one of these new categories, any assistance you could provide to help expand the catalogs would be most appreciated. We also welcome any suggestions you may have for future collectible categories to be added!


Colnect has the world's biggest phone card catalog, with over 200,000 currently being displayed! Colnect also features tens of thousands of items in our stamp catalog, coin catalog, bank note catalog, and bottle cap catalog. In addition, our newly-created tea bag catalog is growing rapidly and now has nearly 2,000 items from 43 countries displayed.

New SPAM technique? "warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html"

It's not uncommon to see weird requests coming to my server at Colnect but I found this one interesting since it came from GoogleBot, the bot used by Google to index the web for its search engine.

The request made by the bot was for the URL:
/warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html

Needless to say, this URL never existed on my domain. Seeing the actual page of atoall . com, having the title "Hot girls pictures free games boys images local news all", made me suspect spamming.

Searching for this URL on Google currently gets 106,000 results for warning_this_is_english_domain_to_solve_this_problem_submit_site_in_atoall.com.html.
which means that Google has indexed that many pages which don't really exist on the other domains. Some very well known domains have this page URL indexed on Google.

How does it happen?

Well, some sites are configured to never return a proper 404 code to let bots and people know the page is not found on their server. They prefer returning a 200 code that tells bots and browsers the page is found. The page's content, displayed to the user, indicates that what the user was looking for was never found. Most users would never know the difference between getting a 404 or 200 code.

So why do they generate a 200 code?

Well, it makes search bots, like Google, index a page that has content which was searched by a user. The next time a user would search for the same term on a search engine, there is a chance that he'll get to their page. Also, as some plug-ins to browsers can "steal" 404 pages by replacing them with their own custom results, returning a 200 code prevents it.

Why shouldn't they generate a 200 code?

The downside of returning such pages is the obvious spamming by sites such as atoall . com and others which seek illegitimate sources of traffic. According to Alexa, the site has been gaining traffic since August and it wouldn't come as a surprised if this unique form of spamming Google's search engine has a lot to do with it.

Another issue is that the search engine may choose to penalize sites which return the wrong results. The search engine can easily know if that is the case by requesting randomly generated page URLs.

So now my only question is: how come Google didn't already penalize atoall . com and removed it from their search results?

Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking

As Colnect is using Google Analytics to measure our traffic, we're happy to learn about the change to their tracking script. Announced 2 days ago and now implemented on Colnect, the script will now be loaded asynchronously and thus not block other page elements from loading. This should results is slightly faster load times and improve user experience on the site.

So now the question is when such asynchronous code be available for AdSense? I see no reason why the ads shouldn't load only when the page has been rendered.