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:

• The list of collectors with negative ratings has now been made public.
• A link to the Swapping Tips page has been added on relevant profile and ratings pages.
• Added a link to the side menu: Forums / Warnings.

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.

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 :)

Banknotes and Bottle Caps Google Gadgets

Do you see the random collectibles on the side of this blog? These are Colnect's iGoogle gadgets.

Following the recent addition of banknotes and bottle caps to Colnect, the matching Google Gadgets, showing a random collectible, are now available.




They can easily be added to your iGoogle page, blog or website using following URIs.

Banknotes:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/banknotes

Bottle Caps:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/bottlecaps

The previous gadgets are also available:

Coins:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/coins

Stamps:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/stamps

Phone Cards:
http://colnect.com/integrations/google_gadget/collectibles/phonecards

Banknotes for Collectors on Colnect

Banknotes are now available on Colnect and collectors from around the world can manage their personal collection using the catalog offered on Colnect, already with over 15,000 banknotes.

New categories can be added to Colnect and if you're a collector of any mass-produced collectible you are most welcomed to help and add your favorite collectibles.

Over a hundred collectors have helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.

Colnect's phonecards catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with ~157,000 phone cards listed. Colnect's coins catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, currently with ~15,000 coins. Colnect's stamps catalog is growing quickly and already has over 68,000 stamps listed. Colnect's new bottle caps catalog already has ~5,400 bottle caps listed.

Collectible Bottle Caps for Collectors on Colnect

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

Colnect's catalogs are created by volunteering collectors and updated constantly. The initial catalog of bottle caps, already with over 5,000 bottle caps, has been contributed by one member of Colnect, Paul Giba.

More categories will soon be added to Colnect and if you're a collector of any mass-produced collectible you are most welcomed to help and add your favorite collectibles.

Over a hundred collectors have helped out to create Colnect's catalogs.

Colnect's phonecards catalog is the world's most extensive, currently with over 155,000 phone cards listed. Colnect's coins catalog is the world's biggest free coins catalog, currently with over 14,000 coins. Colnect's stamps catalog is growing quickly and already has over 68,000 stamps listed.

Coins catalog: over 14,000 coins

Quietly but surely, Colnect's coins catalog, being built by coin collectors for coin collectors, has surpassed 14,000 listed coins. It's freely available for browsing even without the need to register. Free registration to Colnect allows collectors to manage their personal collection.

Colnect's coins catalog is currently the world's biggest freely available resource for coin pictures and information.

Collectors premium services on Colnect

A few days ago, Colnect's premium services for collectors have finally opened up. Colnect has already been offering a respectable set of free services to collectors from around the world. These free services will continue to be offered for the benefit of the entire collectors community.

The announcement has been made:
"Premium membership gives you access to several features that will enhance your Colnect experience. If you regularly use Colnect, please consider supporting us by becoming a premium member."

Currently, not many premium services are offered but these will be added with time according to collector demands.

Happy collecting :)

3,500 collectors on Colnect

Yesterday Colnect has passed the mark of 3,500 registered collectors. This is an increase of over 17% during the last 2 months. Just before starting this year, Colnect had passed the 3,000 collectors mark. Considering the fact that ridiculously little marketing work has been done (~$50 spent on ads...), I see this as a very respectable achievement that continues the growth that started when Colnect V2 was released.

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 using a single click?

So what's next?

Colnect will expand to more collectible fields as requests come from existing members of the community. Some requested premium services are also planned.

Very happy holidays :) Over 3,000 collectors on Colnect

As 2009 is looming, Colnect has happily announced that its community now has over 3,000 members. Colnect's community growth rate has been on the increase, especially since the new Colnect V2 site has been launched during the midst of October. Since now Colnect caters to stamps and coins collectors, it has found a new crowd of people interesting in managing their personal collection easily and connect with other collectors from around the world.

Colnect's development relies on the assistance of its ~70 contributors who volunteer to translate Colnect, update its database with new collectibles and help with various tasks.

Though this blog has recently been quiet, a lot has happened on Colnect recently. The lack of a PR department in Colnect takes its toll and certainly Colnect would have bloomed much sooner with such. New features and fixes are added daily to the site and the contributors help update the catalogs on a regular basis. Colnect's collectors forums provide more detailed information about recent updates to the site.

iGoogle Collectibles Gadgets

Colnect has just released 3 iGoogle gadgets that you can see right here on the side of this blog. Read all about these cool collectibles gadgets.

Here's the description:

A cool gadget for collectors! See a new random collectible item. Click the picture to see complete information about the item: which memebers of Colnect Collectors Community have it on their collection, swap or wish list. You can easily manage your personal collection on Colnect and find swap buddies from all around the world. The huge catalogs on Colnect are created by collectors for collectors. Join Colnect now. It's fun, it's quick and it's free! Happy Collecting :)

50% increase in Colnect's growth rate - welcoming stamps and coins collectors

Less than 2 weeks following the initial release of Colnect V2 and without any commercial advertising of Colnect, there are already ~90 active coins collectors from 35 countries and ~50 active stamps collectors from 25 countries on Colnect. Active refers to a collector who has updated his/her personal collection on Colnect.

The overall amount of newly registered members during the last week shows ~50% increase over the weeks before it. This achievement, enhanced by the facts that the new site experienced some downtime and that registration now requires email address confirmation, should probably be attributed to the collectors who already know Colnect. Some collectors collect more than a single collectible and so many phonecard+coin collectors would know other coin collectors and let them know about how useful Colnect would be for them.

To help motivating collectors the following news item has recently been published on Colnect:

Help Colnect and Win Free Phonecards!

Colnect now has a huge stamps and coins catalog. However, since it's so new, many collectors of stamps and coins have not yet heard about us. Now is your chance to help Colnect and win free phonecards.
How?

Simply tell your collector friends to join Colnect. Once they join and update their collection, they should Contact Us and tell us you told them about Colnect. Every friend that joined Colnect with your help entitles you to 10 points. Each friend your friend bring, gives you 3 more points.
Who will win?

The 3 collectors who has accumulated most points until the 30th of November.
What will you win?

First place: 50 Phonecards
Second place: 40 Phonecards
Third place: 30 Phonecards
BONUS: A Colnect T-Shirt.
Questions?

Visit the forum for answers.

What about commercial advertising

Though so far Colnect did not rely on any commercial advertising but rather 'word of mouth' and friendly reviews and backlinks, it may be a good idea to advertise it some more with AdSense or a similar program. For the time being, I prefer to see a steady growth while I'm fine tuning the system and perfecting it rather than a flood which will make Colnect buzzing and later endangered.

150 OpenSearch plugins for Colnect

"OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results" the official website says. OpenSearch makes interfacing a website in which you use a lot of search much easier since you don't have to navigate through the site's pages to see the results. You skip waiting for a new page and save yourself some time.

Colnect supports OpenSearch for the benefit of the collectors on the site who often search the huge catalogs for the items they're interested in.

In Firefox:

and IE7:


Yesterday I've tried to publish the plugins on Mycroft Project so collectors could easily install from there as well. It's probably the web's most notable directory for OpenSearch plugins. The problem is that Mycroft has no auto-submission feature to be found and so I couldn't add all the plugins.

"How many plugins have you made?" you might ask and the answer is quite simple. There's one plugin to search for a collectible item by name and another to search for a collector by username. Later I may add searching by catalog code. So what's the problem submitting 2 plugins manually? Well... that 2 turned into 150 since currently there are 3 collectible types on Colnect (coins, stamps and phonecards) and the site is supported in 25 languages. 2 times 3 times 25 gets to 150 and that's not so much fun to do manually anymore... I hope they'll come up with a solution. The best would be to use simply submit the site's URLs and let MyCroft use the auto-discovery link tags like the browsers use to allow you to add the plugin.

Happy OpenSearching...

Colnect V2 is now LIVE! :)

Following a long period of hard work, Colnect V2 is now up and running. It is a completely new version of the familiar Colnect. Its huge catalogs, from which any collector can easily manage his/her personal collection, currently include nearly 12,000 coins and over 120,000 collectible phone cards. As the catalog information is contributed by collectors, the catalog is expected to grow very quickly in the coming months.

Colnect V2 is available in 25 languages accommodating for the needs of collectors from all around the globe.

Go check out the site and register if you haven't so far. We're on the way to revolutionize the collectibles world.

Colnect V2 alpha site is up for the Prague Fair

During 12-14/9/2008 a big international collectors fair is being held in Prague. To allow collectors to preview the new version of Colnect, which includes a vast database of stamps, the alpha site has been opened and is available here.

At the moment it is NOT yet considered stable and is meant only for the taste of how Colnect would be. Hopefully, it'll be ready by the end of the month and the current Colnect will be replaced by the new improved one.

There are many new things in Colnect V2 but perhaps the most important ones for current Colnect members are the addition of versatile filters to the system which allow collectors to easily find the items they're looking for and match them with collections of other collectors.

Updates to follow...

How many collectible phone cards are there?

I'm sorry but this blog post is not going to answer that question.

When I took over Colnect (previously known as Islands Phonecards Database) we've had ~30,000 collectible phone cards in our database. Less than a month ago I've written that "Collectible phone cards catalog has passed 100,000 items" but as of today I'm happy to announce that Colnect's catalog has just passed the 110,000 mark.

It seems that not only is the database growing, but that its growth rate is on the rise. So when will it stop? Obviously it'll start slowing down when most of the collectible phone cards in the world will already be listed on Colnect. Just how many are there? As I know we're still missing some tens of thousands of Brazilian and Chinese cards, my assumption ranges somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 different collectible phone cards. The variation is great due to the unexpected nature of variants. A card may be listed once but then an expert collectors note that there were small variations between the different prints and one card becomes 20 different variants, all with different collectible value.

So when will this race stop? Let's wait and see...

Collectible phone cards catalog has passed 100,000 items

Colnect has the world's most extensive collectible phone cards catalog. Just now the milestone of 100,000 listed collectible phone cards has been passed.
A big thanks goes to all contributors who are helping in making Colnect the best resource for phone card information. Colnect is a huge community endeavor that helps in creating a catalog with user assistance. This wiki-style catalog is changing constantly and thus offers collectors the most up-to-date information.

Yesterday another smaller milestone has been passed: over 2,000 collectors are now members of Colnect.

Colnect philately is now under construction and will hopefully revolutionize the philately world as much as it has done in the fusilately world.

colnect.com - the new logo

Say hello to the new logo of colnect.com. The magnifying glass is commonly used by collectors when they inspect the quality and finer details of their collectibles.

The website still carries the old Islands Phonecards Database logo but this will soon become history. [UPDATE: it is gone]

And this last logo was a candidate but never made it to the finals :)

My visit to WSC ISRAEL 2008

My interest in visiting the world stamp championship exhibition might have been a bit different than that of most visitors. As stamps are the next collectible to be added to colnect, I wanted to get better feeling of the hobby and meet some people with whom some future business cooperation would be achieved.

My experience was enriching as stamps, unlike phone cards, have existed for ~170 years and so have more stories and are more established as collectibles. It's a complete world to discover.

Meeting representatives of a few postal authorities went very well. I tried to interest them about the benefits colnect could bring them. Most of the people I spoke with were excited about the ideas presented and so I hope that the enthusiasm would continue to real actions.

The attached pictures show boards containing some of the world's rarest stamps presented in the exhibition.

The other PR (Public Relations)

Just appropriate that following a post about PageRank, there'll be something with a more positive note.

TheMarker, a popular Israeli newspaper concerning economics, have published an article (in Hebrew) about phone cards collectors and colnect.

The Islands Phonecards Database story now has a Russian version (originally posted in English).

colnect.com has also been mentioned in Telecartofilistas and Dia de Folga, Brazilian blogs in Portuguese.