I’ve always prided myself on not having any sort of advertising on my websites.  I haven’t even signed up for an Amazon affiliate account (and I link to Amazon all the time just because I think they’re awesome), which I’ve been told is a naive maintenance of purity. So when Graham Langdon of Entrecard emailed me and offered me some credits and a free shirt if I, uhh…wore their shirt (big surprise), I figured I’d better try them out to see if I really believe in their service before I plaster their logo across my chest (like any other woman, you don’t get access unless you make me happy). 

The concept is essentially a  link exchange based on a click economy.  When you visit other blogs in the Entrecard network, you’re exposed to another blog’s ad, leave your card, and both blogger and visitor earn a point.  The owner of the site can browse through who has left cards and make an offer to advertise on them or other sites in the directory.  The more cards you get (therefore the more popular you are), the more credits it takes to purchase a link on your blog.  I’ve already got advertisements for other blogs displayed in the sidebar, and my ad should get in rotation for other blogs in a few days. 

I’m trying this service for about the same reason I joined MyBlogLog…to establish a network and bring in new readers.  But unlike MyBlogLog, one of my biggest complaints about Entrecard so far are that leaving cards is a manual process which will lose opportunities to connect (todo:  write a greasemonkey script to fix this).  This kind of traffic isn’t as high quality as one would get from linking and contributing comments to websites on similar yet non-competing topics, but Entrecard is like a blog dating service…sometimes you just gotta meet someone somewhere.

Ok, I confess I didn’t want to lay down this much insight into Entrecard until I’d had some time to see if they really work, but my thoughts are still complicated with the need to justify my decision to start serving ads.  Part of this whole system that fascinates me is the similarity between EC’s (Entrecard credits) and Cory Doctorow’s whuffie economy.  Entrecard certainly isn’t post-scarcity, though…since EC’s are a new currency that doesn’t take into account my existing uniques, Page Rank, or RSS readers, it takes a lot of effort to build up enough capital to invest into associating my brand with a quality site, all while suffering in the lower class and selling 125 x 125 pixels of my soul for a mere 4 EC. 

I’m giving the service two weeks before I make up my mind to either stick with the service or go back to devoting that extra mental bandwidth to creating good old fashioned quality content. 

I was just trying to send a picture to myself to edit out the phone number from the display on my office phone (you’ll see it here in a minute), and I swear Sprint has the most convoluted mobile picture system in the US.  When you send a picture message to a mobile number or email, the recipient doesn’t get your image as an attachment, they have to go on the Sprint website and are presented the image in a slideshow (with multiple "buy prints" links).  To download the image, you have to exit the slideshow and click an unlabeled dropdown menu.  I consider myself to be pretty damn competent figuring out interfaces (on average I try 3 new websites or applications a day), so if it takes me more than 60 seconds to figure out how to perform a simple task, there is something grievously wrong.

This is such a shame since it ruins the flow their almost perfect text messaging application and makes it hell for developers to work with their system.  C’mon Sprint, stop forcing your monetization scheme on users as a value add and give us a system that just works.

I met Pete Cashmore of Mashable at the Crunchies last weekend, and he was very adamant to get me to submit pictures of their shirt that just came out in the latest Startup Schwag package.

PS:  See?  Potato.