Friday, April 2, 2010

Collectors Joining Colnect on March - a New Record

March has shown record growth to Colnect's collectors base. Many collectors still use Colnect without registering and enjoy the free catalogs offered on the site. Over 60,000 people have visited Colnect on March. However, to manage their personal collection with Colnect, collectors have to register Colnect. This March, as Colnect passed the 10,000 members milestone, a record growth of 11% (1,033 new collectors) was achieved.

We extend our warm welcome to all new members of Colnect. Colnect is built by our members and the more collectors join, the better our catalogs will get.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

10,000 Collectors Collect and Connect on Colnect

Colnect has achieved probably its most prestigious milestone to date, as we now have 10,000 registered collectors from all over the world! This accomplishment was greatly accelerated by a record number of new collector sign-ups over the past couple of months, a trend that surely indicates Colnect is on the verge of becoming one of the world's most popular collecting sites. Perhaps even more impressively, 109 countries spanning every continent are now represented by at least one active Colnect collector. As our international reach expands, we can only except even more collectors to discover the benefits of using Colnect to collect and connect with fellow collectors from all around the globe.




While all this is obviously great news for the site, individual collectors (like YOU) stand to benefit most from Colnect's rapid development. More collectors means more possible swap partners as well as a greater number of potential contributors to Colnect. This is a crucial point, since Colnect's catalogs are created and managed entirely in a wiki-like fashion, meaning the catalogs can only be as complete as the resources of our collectors. In addition, having an incredibly diverse membership on Colnect will open up many more opportunities for new collectible categories, with several of these already in the planning or development phase. As always, feel free to contact us if you would like to assist Colnect with language translations, adding new items to the catalogs, or editing the current catalog data.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Thousands of Indian Students Yearn to Join Colnect Family

In response to the partnership we reached with Freshersworld.com, India's most popular students web-site, thousands of young Indians submitted applications to become Campus Ambassadors for that site and are now eligible to fill three exclusive Colnect internship places! We are overjoyed to see the dedication from some of the sharpest minds on campuses across India. As of March 9, 139 applicants from around the country have been chosen to represent their schools as Campus Ambassadors for Freshersworld. This reflects the enormous talent pool on display at Indian universities and the potential of its students to achieve greatness in their endeavours. From these, the top three finishers in the final phase will win the grand prize of an internship and will have the opportunity to work on various projects at Colnect.



Given our ambitious plans to continue building Colnect into the best collectors web site, the addition of three sharp, committed young minds to assist us with many technological and managerial projects will be most welcome. For our collectors, this means that we should be more responsive to your questions and concerns, while also having more resources at our disposal to make long-term improvements that should enhance everyone's collection experience. However, the key to Colnect's future greatness is having dedicated contributors who provide their unique expertise of a particular collectible or language to benefit everyone! If you would like to help with catalog additions, modifications, or language translations, please feel free to Contact Us.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Facebook: Celebrate Your Birthday Every Day

Since Facebook's inception and rapid ascent to global prominence, many users have doubtlessly experimented with ways to play practical jokes on their friends or to get a certain message across, depending on their reasons for using the social networking site. One simple yet highly amusing method has been for a user to change their birthday periodically in order to repeatedly generate the massive flood of greetings left on their walls from well-meaning "friends". All that is required to pull this off is a simple profile modification and a sufficient number of gullable and/or forgetful friends. Due to Facebook automatically displaying birthday notifications on every friend's homepage, this can also be a highly effective way to generate clicks on your profile and attract attention, even if some people don't write on your wall or actually see through your little ruse.

To test out this practice, founder of Colnect conducted a small experiment whereby he and an associate entered a fake "Facebook birthday" into their profiles on two separate occasions within a 4-5 week period. One interesting stat he wished to uncover was how many "friends" would obliviously send him birthday greetings on both days. As he observed, his Facebook friends list is a particularly fascinating test group, since it consists of people he has fairly close personal relationships with and those who are entirely virtual connections made to promote his collectors web-site. In the end, he found the results of his skullduggery both humourous and befuddling.



On his original fake birthday, he received a total of 63 birthday wishes on his Facebook Wall and Inbox, while his associate's profile accepted 47 such misplaced greetings only a couple of days following his non-existent celebrations. Perhaps most interesting is that he also received three "Happy Birthday" phone calls from real world friends who believed the information on Facebook, despite having attended his real birthday celebrations only six months earlier. "I didn't realize how forgettable my party was," the chairman of the collectibles web-site quipped. In addition, his 2nd fraudulent Facebook birthday generated 62 well wishes, including 26 repeat offenders from the first day barely one month prior, while the second time around his associate's profile received 57 greetings and 17 duplicate wishers from before.

Although the direct ramifications of this may be trivial, it does perhaps illustrate a tendency of users to automatically accept information displayed on Facebook as absolute fact, even when contrary evidence is readily available (in the cases of those who wished the same person "Happy Birthday" twice within a matter of weeks and his real world birthday party attendees). Savvy Facebook users and spammers could easily utilize this fact to manipulate others for far more cynical purposes. It also brings up the question as to why Facebook lets its members change their birthday an infinite number of times, given that by definition it's a static piece of information. While it's understandable that someone could lie or mistakenly enter an incorrect birthday when they first registered and wish to correct this, allowing users to alter their birthday on multiple occasions seems to be opening the door to such blatant shenanigans.

So what's your opinion on this? Should FaceBook limit the ability to modify one's birthday?

Monday, March 1, 2010

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.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

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).

Collectors Statistics

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.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

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.

Monday, February 15, 2010

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.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

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.

Friday, February 5, 2010

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.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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.

Monday, February 1, 2010

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.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

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.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

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.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

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.

Monday, January 11, 2010

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.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

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.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

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:

Sunday, December 27, 2009

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.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

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.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

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.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

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.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

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?

Thursday, December 3, 2009

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.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

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.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

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.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

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].

Sunday, November 22, 2009

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.

Monday, November 16, 2009

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! :)

Thursday, November 12, 2009

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 :)

Monday, November 9, 2009

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.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

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?

Saturday, October 31, 2009

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.

Friday, October 30, 2009

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.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

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.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

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.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

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?

Sunday, September 6, 2009

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:

Over 1.8 million page views
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.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

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.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

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.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

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).

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.

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