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.

Note to Facebook Collectors of Coins, Banknotes, Stamps and other Collectibles

Stamps? Coins? Banknotes? Phone Cards? Bottle Caps? Tea Bags?

Though only recently have we publicized our FaceBook fan page for collectors, we already have to change it due to limitations with FaceBook. The former page name was "colnect.com", which is not a bad name but when searching FaceBook for "colnect" it would never appear in the search results. Contacting FaceBook's support resulted in no answer. Trying to change the name of the page also fails so we've now opened a new page "" and welcome all collectors to join us there.

Colnect Collectors Club Community: Stamps - Coins - Banknotes -Collectibles en Facebook

Colnect Collectors Club Thanksgiving Gift - THREE New Categories - Transportation Tickets, Hotel Key Cards and Bank Cards

Colnect is proud to announce the much-anticipated expansion of its catalogs, as collectors can now trade and manage their collections in 3 new categories: bank cards, hotel key cards, and transportation tickets. These new additions further enhance the overall variety available on Colnect and will help it appeal to an even greater number of collectors.

If you or a friend collect any of these items, feel free to check out our new online wiki catalog for bank cards, hotel key cards, and transportation tickets. You can easily start managing your personal collection on Colnect using these catalogs and easily make exchanges with other collectors.

While these categories will initially offer relatively small catalogs, they will grow over time thanks to the generous help of our dedicated collectors.

Our bank card catalog, which has launched with a few hundred items, was made possible through the tireless work of a single Colnect collector, Hendy Florez [hflorez] .

Similarly, our hotel key card catalog was contributed by the devoted efforts Colnect member Ignacio F López Vico [iflvico] and presently features 244 cards. Ignacio is also the coordinator of our world's biggest phone cards catalog and has so far tremendously helped Colnect.

And last but surely not least, Gary Hoff [gazzaoz] was responsible for creating our transportation ticket catalog that currently has 222 items now viewable on the site with all the others.



Although the work of these 3 Colnect collectors is especially noteworthy, Colnect would like to thank all the volunteer contributors who continue to ensure that our freely available collectible catalogs as comprehensive and up-to-date as they are.

If you have any suggestions for future new categories, please read here.

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 recently-created tea bag catalog is growing rapidly and now has over 1,744 tea bags from 43 countries displayed.

So what about more categories? Well, YOU can help.

World's Biggest Phone Cards Catalogs Now Has Over 200,000 Phonecards Listed!

Colnect's comprehensive catalogs reached yet another milestone today, as 200,000 phonecards have now been uploaded onto the site. Perhaps even more impressively, over 4,444 phonecards were added by dedicated phone card collectors and contributors in the past month alone. More phone card collectors enjoy Colnect, with over 400 collectors currently having at least 1,000 phonecards marked in their collection (and many more with smaller but still sizable inventories). Brazil, with over 50,000 phone cards listed, is now by far the largest source of these phone cards.

Our phone card catalog is only as big and as extensive due the continuing work of contributing collectors who help us make it the best catalog out there. We would like to extend our gratitue to each and every one of and especially to our phone card coordinator, Ignacio F López Vico [iflvico].

80,000 Stamps on Colnect's Free Stamp Catalog

Colnect's continually growing stamp catalog has eclipsed a new milestone, as 80,000 stamps are now featured on the site! This milestone could not have been reached without the unwavering support of stamp collectors and contributors, who are constantly adding to and updating the catalogs to provide the best collection experience possible. Colnect catalogs will continue to improve on the most extensive variety of collectibles through expansion into new categories and the ongoing enhancement of existing ones.

During the last month, over 4,000 stamps were added and we've like to use the opportunity to thank the collectors who have helped out by contributing content and especially to our stamps coordinator, Fabian Eicke.

3,440,000 Pages Indexed on Google - 7,000 Collectors Are Members

Colnect has reached a new milestone today by eclipsing the 7,000 collectors mark! This lucky milestone X 1000 indicates that Colnect continues to grow and reach new heights. At this rate, it won't be long before Colnect challenges E-Bay as the web's most popular collectibles site.

Remember: You can help Colnect grow while also earning money for yourself through our affiliates program.



We're also happy to let you know that Colnect has over 3.4 million pages indexed on Google. As more collectors on Colnect help out improving Colnect's catalogs by adding items, the amount of pages offered by Colnect is growing quickly.

Happy collecting! :)

Colnect's Founder Speaks With Leadel.NET

This interview has been done a couple of months ago and published yesterday. At the time, Colnect had ~4,200 collectors and today we are nearly 7,000 strong. There are a lot of references to Colnect's winning the Startup2.0 competition but it also goes over what Colnect is and is trying to achieve.

You're welcomed to comment here or on YouTube. Enjoy :)

Colnect Finalizes the Acquisition of E-Bay (as confirmed on LinkedIn)

Colnect expanded its market reach today by acquiring the on-line startup E-Bay, in a move designed to solidify its place atop the collectibles market. The transaction was confirmed on LinkedIn, with Amir Wald taking over immediately as E-Bay's Chairman of the Board and CEO. Although the acquisition is expected to increase traffic to Colnect slightly, the real long-term benefits lie in the potential of using the Colnect brand name to rejuvenate E-Bay's (and several of its subsidiaries) fledgling operations and to eventually turn them into profitable ventures with high traffic.



Now seriously: Linked-In should fix this bug ASAP.

AdSense Revenues vs. Traffic

Should more traffic bring more revenues on AdSense? Read on and you might be surprised.

Colnect is a content-rich website for collectors of stamps, coins, banknotes, Phone Cards, Bottle Caps and Tea Bags.

We use Google Analytics to measure our traffic and it's connected to the AdSense account. A comparison of Colnect's statistics for September-October 2009 reveal that in comparison to the 61 days before them, there has been a rise of 31% in AdSense Page Impressions, 36% in AdSense Unit Impressions but ONLY 3.3% in AdSense Revenues!!!

Yes, you are reading these statistics correctly. Correlation between the rise in traffic and in revenues is almost non-existent. A few reasons come to mind but let's start with your comments on the subject. What do you think?

Collectors on FaceBook

Stamps? Coins? Banknotes? Phone Cards? Bottle Caps? Tea Bags?

Collectors from all around the world, even those not familiar with Colnect and how unique it is, are welcomed to view Colnect's fan page on FaceBook:

Special November Promotion

You can get FREE premium membership for 1 month. No payment details needed. Share your Colnect profile on your FaceBook wall and ask us for FREE membership.

6,666 collectors - 46,666 monthly visitors - 2,123,456 page views

Maybe others like to present their statistics in round numbers, but not on Colnect. Just about 2 months ago, there were 5,555 collectors who became Colnect members and now we've crossed the 6,666 mark. That's exactly 20% growth, which is unfortunately a round number ;)

Traffic from non-registered members has also grown considerably since we last reported. Over 2,123,456 pages of Colnect were presented to more than 46,666 unique visitors during the last 30 days. This is a growth of approximately 7.77% and 5.43% from the previous 30 days.

Why Should You Care?

Collector? The more Colnect members there are, the more possibilities to find other collectors to trade with. More collectors are updating our catalogs constantly.

Dealer? The more Colnect members there are, the more... OK, you already know what that means.

Advertiser? More than ever, now you can easily address a highly targeted crowd of collectors. Check our advertising page.

Why is Colnect Growing?

Colnect's website, our main product, has been constantly improving. Responding to demands by collectors, the system is becoming easier and more functional to use. This encourages "word of mouth" viral spreading. Yes, it's a bit of a pat on the back but we know there's still a lot of work ahead.
Since the winning of the Startup2.0 competition, media attention has helped the growth as well.
Some non-professional SEO has helped as well. Colnect contains a lot of original content and should be favored by search engines, given that they are properly presented with it. As the content of Colnect's catalogs is constantly growing (soon we'll cross the 200,000 phonecards mark), search engines have more Colnect pages to index.

Over 2 Million Monthly Page Views

As previously reported, Colnect's traffic keeps growing nicely and we've recently passed the mark of over 2 Million page views during the last 30 days. As new collectors join Colnect and discover how it benefits them, existing members use the site extensively to manage their personal collection, which explains the rise in seen page views. This increase in site use is much bigger than the increase in page views since many actions which formerly required the whole page to be refreshed are now easily performed with Ajax requests and are thus NOT counted as page views anymore.

6,000 Registered Collectors on Colnect - Over 44,000 People Visited Colnect Last Month

During the last month, over 44,000 people have visited Colnect. Colnect's community has been growing rapidly recently and we're now over 6,000 collectors, coming from 98 different countries and using Colnect in 38 languages. Less than two month ago Colnect has passed the 5,000 collectors mark and the road to 7,000 is expected to be shorter :)

Colnect enables collectors to easily manage their personal collection and coordinate swaps ans sales. Many collectors choose to display their collections on Colnect and so you can easily see our active Stamp collectors, Coin collectors, Banknote collectors, Bottle Cap collectors and Phonecard collectors.

In addition to Colnect's unique services to collectors, it offers relevant social networking features to allow members to communicate, become friends, rate each other and more.

Opera 10 is Opera 9.8?! A user-agent Identity Crisis

Opera 10 has been released and naturally Colnect has to be tested with it. Although all of today's browsers are "complaint", they all produce different results for the same pages.

On Colnect, there are CSS pop-up menus for both the top menu and side menu. Perhaps not the best design decision, they are yet very functional to members browsing the site. So far, only Internet Explorer (IE) was not responding properly to the top menus. IE6 or lesser doesn't support them. IE7 does support them but displays them in the wrong position for right-to-left languages. IE8 does the job properly, as well as FireFox, Chrome and Opera. Actually, that was until the new Opera 10 came out and now the right-to-left languages display the popup CSS menus displaced and unusable. Only on Opera 10 the side menu pop-ups now have problems as well.

To ensure people choosing problematic browsers don't suffer, Colnect's code checks the browser by using its USER-AGENT string. When a problematic browser is encountered, the pop-up menus will simply not appear. That's how I found out that the brand new Opera 10 tells web server it's actually Opera 9.8 engine. See for yourself:



Identity crisis for Opera?

29% More People Watching Colnect on August! :)

Colnect is gaining some great traction. August 2009 had very good results. Below is a report from Google Analytics tracking usage of Colnect:


During August 2009, Colnect has been visited by over 40,000 people watching more than 1,800,000 pages Colnect. This is a traffic growth of nearly 30% and 20% respectively compared to the previous month.

In addition, the number of registered members on Colnect grew by 10.6% on August, reaching 5,651 members on September 1st.

Why is Colnect Growing?

Colnect's website, its main product, has been constantly improving. Responding to demands by collectors, the system is becoming easier and more functional to use. Some annoying bugs have been fixed as well. This encourages "word of mouth" viral spreading. Yes, it's a bit of a pat on the back but we know there's still a lot of work ahead.
Since the winning of the Startup2.0 competition, media attention has helped the growth as well.
Some non-professional SEO has helped as well. Colnect contains a lot of original content and should be favored by search engines, given that they are properly presented with it. As the content of Colnect's catalogs is constantly growing, search engines have more Colnect pages to index.
But not all efforts were productive. These two paths followed with high hopes for incoming traffic yielded poor results: the ads on TechCrunch (Colnect's prize of the Startup2.0 competition) and Colnect's Twitter activity. Both brought a meager amount of incoming traffic with a relatively very high bounce rate, i.e users watching a single page and leaving.

Future Plans

Many planned product improvements will provide useful additional features and an overall better user experience. Many direct requests from collectors enjoying Colnect, usually the more "addicted" members, help us decide where we should be heading next.

Colnect advertising on TechCrunch - the results

As promised previously, this post will reveal the results of Colnect's advertising on TechCrunch.

A short reminder: a couple of months ago, Colnect, a unique website for collectors, has won the Startup2.0 competition in Spain. The prize chosen was an advertisement space on TechCrunch, a world known technology blog. Revealing Colnect's results may perhaps assist those who wish to make a decision on whether or not advertising on TechCrunch would be beneficial to their business.

Horrible Service
Based on our email correspondence:
* It took 1.5 months (!!!) for TechCrunch to start running Colnect's ad although it was told that they'll run it as soon as they get it. A fair share of emails were sent throughout that time and got royally ignored.
* It was told the the ads rotate randomly. The ads on TechCrunch do not rotate randomly. Either something is broken on the ad system or it's intentional. I checked hundreds of pages showing ads (at different times) and Colnect's ad never appeared on the top two rows (out of 5 rows). When repeatedly asked about it, the only answer was that they'll get back to me on it. As a compensation, they ran my ad an extra week and again promised an answer. However, until now no such answer has been received.

The Results
One last important note before revealing the results. Colnect is a unique website for collectors and TechCrunch is a technology blog. A tech-related ad on TechCrunch would probably have faired better.

Colnect's ad ran for 2 weeks and, according to Google Analytics, resulted in 800 visits with a really high bounce rate (visits that leave the site after one page) of 58%. According to my server stats there have been 1,319 total clicks on Colnect's ad coming from 990 distinct IP addresses.

Feel free to comment here if you have any questions.

Collecting Tea Bags? Colnect presents the world's first Tea Bags catalog for collectors

Tea Bags are now available on Colnect and collectors from around the world can manage their personal collection using the catalog offered on Colnect.

If you're a tea bags collector, have friends who collect tea bags or are just curious about this unique collectible, feel welcomed to browse Colnect's online wiki catalog for tea bags - the world's first!

Colnect's catalogs are created by volunteering collectors and updated constantly. Our world-unique catalog of tea bags, already with over 500 tea bags, has been contributed by one member of Colnect, Carine De Pauw [crookscarine].

Any mass-produced collectibles that collectors frequently swap, but and sell are most welcomed on Colnect and you can easily add your favorite collectibles category.

Currently, 116 collectors have already helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.

Colnect's phone card catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with over 191,000 phone cards listed! Colnect's coin catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, presenting over 16,000 coins. Colnect's stamp catalog is growing quickly and already has over 74,000 stamps listed. Our extensive banknote catalog lists over 16,000 banknotes and our bottle cap catalog has recently grown to nearly 11,000 bottle caps.

5,555 Collectors on Colnect

Colnect's community has been growing very nicely recently and we're now 5,555 collectors, coming from 88 countries and using Colnect in 38 languages. Less than a month ago Colnect has passed the 5,000 collectors mark and so we're experiencing a growth of over 11% in a month!

Colnect enables collectors to easily manage their personal collection and coordinate swaps ans sales. Many collectors choose to display their collections on Colnect and so you can easily see our active Stamp collectors, Coin collectors, Banknote collectors, Bottle Cap collectors and Phonecard collectors.

In addition to Colnect's unique services to collectors, it offers relevant social networking features to allow members to communicate, become friends, rate each other and more.

Editing Collectors: Improved Interface

Colnect's wiki-like collectibles catalogs are growing quickly with the assistance off volunteering contributing collectors who send information missing in the catalogs and volunteering editing collectors (or simply "editors") who make the actual changes to the catalogs, guaranteeing their quality .

The editing interface used by the editors is very simple. A small editing icon is present near all fields they can edit and by clicking it a window pops up which allows them to set the new value. Every item edited generated an immediate tweet on @ColnectEdits. Seems that due to the volume of edits, Twitter no longer indexes any tweets by @ColnectEdits.



An important improvement of the interface has just been announced and accepted with enthusiasm by some the editors. Using JavaScript, the page is no longer reloaded after each edit. It's a simple change but saves editors a lot of time and thus encourages them to do more edits. As it's not so complex to implement, I wonder why much great endeavors than Colnect, such as WikiPedia have not yet something similar (or better).

Bottle Caps Catalog - Doubled in Size!

During the last few days, Colnect's bottle cap catalog has doubled its size. There are currently nearly 11,000 bottle caps listed. Many thanks go to Art Zhitnik who has contributed the information based on his own bottle cap collection. Art has created a bottle cap cataloging software, Caps Navigator, which allows bottle cap collectors to create their own database. Due to his organized contribution to Colnect, other collectors will be able to use the pictures and information to easily manage their personal collection on Colnect.

Since the information is of Art's own collection, editors on Colnect will now work on "merging" duplicate items. It's a very common task on Colnect's wiki-catalogs since it happens that some items are accidentally added more than once. When two items are "merged", the inventory information is kept. So, for example, if a collector marked either of the items on his wish list, the "merged" item will be on his wish list.