A Look at Todays EntreCard

Posted By ê¿ê on May 21st, 2008

Back in the good old days, when EntreCard was new and I was a new member of it, things were simple, straightforward and we had this shiny goal in front of us — to visit as many as 300 new blogs per day and leave our marks in the blogosphere. A refreshing change from other Social Networking sites I had been encouraged to join.

Todays EntreCard still purports to have those same shiny goals, but like one of those “luxury watches” available on Ebay, either the shine is getting a bit tarnished or the scales have fallen from this users eyes — you choose.

This week EntreCard rolled out several new improvements to the system. Some of these were long awaited and oft asked for. Nearly all of them have been well received and even those that weren’t received with wide open arms, were received with suggestions to tweak and make them juuuuusst a little more user-friendly. In typical Phyrite phasion (sorry couldn’t resist the alliteration), those tweaks came quickly and professionally.

So what’s my beef you ask?

Well, I’ve been a “power dropper” for some time now — nearly always reaching the maximum of 300 drops per day on a daily basis. If I didn’t make it, I literally didn’t have access to the internet. Even days when I was sick and spent most of the day in bed with fever and chills, I managed to drag myself into the computer room long enough to drop 300 cards.

It takes me awhile to do this as I tend to read posts and comment on those that I feel can use my input, need my expertise or that prompt me to ask “huh?” I have my method of accomplishing this goal and it involves rewarding my list of faithful readers, advertisers and those who accept my ads first, then I get on to the “others”.

Included in the new features roll-out this week is the ability to combine blogs under one email account. This makes managing multiple blogs easy and was the main reason that up until this week, I only had one blog registered with EntreCard. It was just too overwhelming to try to maintain multiple blogs in the manner I think a blog SHOULD be maintained and do the drop thing as well. It’s the single most asked for feature included in the roll-out package and has given a new insight on just how people are using EntreCard to drive traffic to their blog(s).

Along with the new features, an E-book on EntreCard was released which contains information about EntreCard’s beginnings, how to make the most of the EntreCard experience and other bits of stuff both important and trivial. It’s not a long book – 16 pages — so you can read it in a flash.

EntreCard is also sponsoring a contest, awarding some 15,000 credits to people who add a blog to their account. If you’ve been waiting as I have to add a blog to the community, now would be a good time to do that!

I’m not entirely sure this contest thing is really going to help EntreCard maintain their goal of having quality blogs for readers to choose from. It seems to me that it’s an encouragement for people to sign up blogs that are “dead”, are in actual fact, “splogs” or ones that are inappropriate to the community for other reasons. I’m sure this will eventually die down, but in the meantime, I’m already seeing more junk blogs than before and that’s taking away some of my precious time for the quality sites. I know we can report these blogs and get them removed from the system — again a tedious process of sending the link/profile link to one of the moderators or the two administrators and a “ban” or “ratings” button has been requested for the widgets. The administrators are still on the fence over that request.

One of the most positive things about EntreCard is that despite some of the negatives, there are tons of positives and make being a member of this community valuable and worthy. If you’re new to EntreCard or don’t know anything about it and are just now reading about it here, I do encourage you to download the Ebook, read about it (it’s a short book and won’t take you long), then click the “get one” underneath the image you see over on the top left. You’ll get traffic to your site, make new friends and be introduced to a whole neighborhood of caring, quality folks.

ê¿ê