Monday, August 24, 2009

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.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Cheating Collectors NOT Welcomed on Colnect

As much as I dislike getting involved in disputes among collectors on Colnect, it is sometimes inevitable. Cheaters are a big problem and I believe that with keeping to some simple rules, frauds can be minimized. For the reason I have created the Swapping Tips page ~3 weeks ago.

Here are some recent changes to Colnect meant to reduce the number of cheaters:

Monday, August 17, 2009

Collectors List Improvements

A long awaited fix to Colnect's collectors list has finally been implemented. As collectors on Colnect may collect different types of collectibles, it's important to see who collects what. The collectors list (see below) now shows it clearly.



In addition, an easy-to-use pop-up selection now allows to filter by collectors of a certain collectible, for example coin collectors or stamp collectors.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Colnect advertising on TechCrunch

Do you want to know how effective advertising on TechCrunch is?

A few months ago, Colnect has won the Startup2.0 competition in Spain. The prize chosen was an advertisement space on TechCrunch, a world known technology blog.

Though it took way too long time (most of which was not my fault), the following ad is now finally displayed:



It will run for a week (started 2 days ago) and I will report how many clicks on it were made. This information may be interesting for those considering advertising on TechCrunch, as it's seemingly quite expensive in comparison to Google's AdWords.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Colnect has sitelinks on Google

Google sitelinks are links shown under some sites in a search results page.

Colnect now finally has sitelinks as the following image shows:



To see how it looks now, simply Google: Colnect.

They are supposed to be somewhat helpful in convincing users to click on one of your results and so that's good news for Colnect. I'd like to accredit it to some recent SEO efforts I've made but the truth is one never really knows...

The odd thing is how these links are chosen by Google's "automatic" process. The words chosen for quicklinks are "Stamps", "Phonecards", "Countries" and "Monedas".
The first two seem a perfect choice as they frequently appear on Colnect and are really a part of what the site is all about. The last two are quite a weird twist of Google's algorithm as "Countries" actually refers to the Banknote catalog - countries list on Colnect and the second one goes to the Spanish version of the coins page, rather than the English one.

Any tips on how their "automatic" algorithm works and how I could optimize for it would be appreciated. Until then, I am, as most, at the mercy of the Google gods.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Collectors on Colnect - over 5,000

Colnect Colnect has passed the mark of 5,000 registered collectors. This is an increase of over 45% from 5 months ago. Considering the lack of true marketing efforts, it is an impressive achievement.

How do collectors learn about Colnect?


As Colnect allows collectors to manage their personal collection and semi-automatically manage swaps with other collectors from around the world, it's the collectors' own interest to have their collector friends join the site. Why would a collector go through the swap and wish lists of another collector manually when a match to his own lists can be done with a click?

So what's next?


Colnect will expand to more collectible fields as requests come from existing members of the community. There are currently already 5 categories (stamps, coins, paper money, phone cards and bottle caps) and a few more are now being worked on by collectors.
Additional services, most of which were requested by the community, are being implemented and will soon be announced.

Happy collecting :)

Monday, July 13, 2009

The World's Biggest Phone Card Catalog lists over 186,000 phone cards

Happy to announce that Colnect's phone cards catalog, the world's most-extensive phone card catalogs, has now over 186,000 phone cards listed in it.

Amazingly, the catalog keeps growing faster than before, with over 27,000 phone card listed during the last 30 days. By the time you read this post the number 186,000 may already be obsolete.

Colnect's catalog is an endeavor of many collectors from all over the world who constantly work improve it.

Using Colnect's catalog, collectors from around the world can easily manage their personal collection on Colnect and find swap buddies from around the world.

Special thanks goes to all the contributors, editors and translators of Colnect.

Happy collecting :)

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Google Follows Colnect and Takes off the BETA

In a previous post about what beta means, I've shared my opinion about Google abusing the BETA mark as to render it almost meaningless, as their example was followed by many other companies in the industry. I've decided that Colnect will not follow and remove its BETA mark as the system became widely used by real users.

Now it seems that Google decided to follow Colnect's way and remove the BETA: "We're taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite.".

Yes Google, it's about time!

To those who didn't follow the humor, I doubt it that the post on Colnect's blog made the difference to Google but it's funnier to think that it did :)

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