Recently, I added EntreCard to the mix of tools that I use with my blog. It has driven a nice mix of new traffic to my site and has brought me to several other very interesting sites. Yesterday, they announced some nice changes to their site as well as introduced a few that I didn’t see in the announcement that I like even better. So, it is probably a good time for me to talk a little bit about what EntreCard is, and why I like it.

When you set up an account on EntreCard, you create a 125x125 pixel image of yourself and/or your blog. Initially, I used the picture of me that I use for most sites. The picture is about two years old, but it is still a good picture. For EntreCard, I put it inside of the red frame that I use as part of my branding.

Years ago, I worked for Union Bank of Switzerland. I’ve been on the Internet since about 1982, so when I started at UBS in the early 90s, I suggested that they needed to set connect to the Internet. I was told that because of all the Swiss concerns about privacy, there was no way that UBS would ever connect to the Internet. Nonetheless, a year later, I was sitting at a conference center in Switzerland talking about what UBS’s online presence should be like.

One of the things that they were very focused on was keeping their brand very clear. In typical Swiss precision, they had details about what fonts needed to be used, what colors needed to be used, and so on. The color was a specific shade of red, which I think they may even have trademarked, and they called UBS Red.

Following this example, I’ve started to use Orient Lodge Red. It is the background border for my blog. I use it on other sites, like Twitter, and any other site which allows me to change the background. There are plenty of other sites that I have used it on yet, but is on my to do list. I chose the shade of red to try and replicate some of the red decorations in the original Orient Lodge.

So, my EntreCard is bordered with Orient Lodge Red. I also created a favicon, by scaling my EntreCard down to favicon size using Gimp.

Part of EntreCard’s updates is an “add new blog” feature. While I have lots of different blogs for testing purposes, the only blog I really use in any sort of production manner is Orient Lodge, so I’m unlikely to use the “add new blog” feature, although I am curious about how it handles things. Do you end up having different cards per blog? How do you direct people to which blog you want to use? I’ll probably do some testing of this later on.

Part of the EntreCard culture is contests. Many sites will have a contest that will give you EntreCard credits if you are the winner. They are having a couple of contests themselves. If you mention the “add new blog” feature and their Official eBook, they will give you 2,000 EntreCard credits. Generally, I don’t go for these. It is essentially pay per post style advertising, and I don’t like to write about things as a paid hack. However, I’ve been meaning to write about EntreCard for a while, so I figured, I’d add their plug in. You can currently buy and I assume sell EntreCard credits on the open market at around $4 /1000 ECs, so the ad is actually worth about $8, in theory.

So, the way I currently use EntreCard is I have their widget right below the MyBlogLog widget. Many of the MyBlogLog recent readers have actually shown up via EntreCard, so I may move their widget up. Typically, I visit people who have visited me. I drop a card on just about every site I visit. As my daughter noted, it is sort of like a simple way of leaving a comment. The comment is essentially, I was here and I found your blog interesting. So far, I’ve dropped about 1600 cards and have had about 800 cards dropped on me. So, the return rate is around 50%. Not bad.

I must admit that I quickly scan many of the blogs I visit, so the number of regular readers that I get is probably very small and the number of new blogs that I’m reading regularly is probably fairly small. Some of the blogs that I visit are ones that I’ve already been visiting through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, or other lists.

EntreCard provides an inbox where you can see who has dropped cards on you recently. Their recent updates have added a time stamp so you can tell which day people dropped the cards. I like this update a lot. I try to visit everyone who has dropped a card on me each day, but I often don’t make it through the list. Partly, this is because I like to chain through the blogs. On each EntreCard widget is a link to the blog advertised on the site. I click from one ad to the next, typically visiting ten sites for every card in my inbox.

So, why do I like EntreCard? Well, first, the downside. There are plenty of blogs that I visit that have no compelling content. The worst are the blogs that all they talk about is getting traffic to their site, perhaps to get people to click on the advertisements or to boost blog rating. I typically click past these blogs pretty quickly. This blog entry might feel a little bit like one of those posts to some of you. If so, I apologize.

More importantly, I’ve read through a great mix of blogs. As I mentioned above, some are blogs that I’ve been reading for quite a while and really enjoy, such as NY Nitty Gritty, a wonderful photoblog of New York City. One blog that I recently found that I’ve really enjoy is First Door on the Left.

Last night, I stumbled across Discovering the Net. They have an article up about hacking your Cannon Digital Camera. It points to CHDK, which is a fascinating project. I’ve started exploring aspect to my old Cannon PowerShot S 410, Firmware Version 1.00M, if I’ve hacked things properly. I’m not sure that CHDK works with the S410, or what it will take to get it to work, but that has become another project on my plate.

I think this illustrates what I hope to gets to why I like EntreCard so much. One of the things that annoys me about so many blogs is that they focus on ‘bonding social capital’, to borrow a phrase from Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone. Many blogs, and progressive political blogs can be the worst, preach to the choir and only get people who already agree with them to read their articles.

I like to focus on ‘bridging social capital’, or reaching out from one community to another. EntreCard is a great tool to bridge different communities. I hope that at least some of the people that stop by my blog as a result of EntreCard stop and read about the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, the American Group Psychotherapy conference, political conventions in Connecticut, or many other topics that they don’t regularly read, but that I frequently have in my mix.