Most of the interface remains unchanged, though it’s supposedly much faster. The way widgets work is the most obvious of the changes:

The upgrade went smoothly on this blog (so far), and I’ll be rolling it out to my own sites, and some of my clients’ sites, over the next couple of days.

If you use the service, you probably know that Entrecards, which used to show approved ads from community members, and paid you in credits, and allowed you to advertise on other Entrecards, now show paid ads 50% of the time.  You can reject paid ads, and check an option (it’s not checked by default!) to only allow approved ads on your widget, but that doesn’t change this core change in the purpose of Entrecard.  OK, so that’s not what Entrecard was to begin with, and not what we signed up for.  But maybe we’ll all make some money, so let’s hear them out.

It was recently announced that algorithms would be developed to determine who gets payouts first.  The algorithm would attempt to determine your value to Entrecard’s community as a whole.  Feel the love.  Here are the criteria:

1. How many cards you drop / how frequently
2. % of paid ads you approve
3. % of Entrecard ads you approve
4. Listings you create / completed sales in the market
5. How many credits you transfer to others (indicative of contests, tips, and generosity)
6. % of credits you spend on Entrecard ads

Ok, so, I have to be willing to approve most of the ads coming my way, even if they’re irrelevant to my site and inappropriate for my visitors?  I have to participate in this weird marketplace community that trades goods and services for Entrecard credits (I thought those were for advertisements, but whatever.  I can pay 1EC for some guy to follow me on Twitter.  Yippee.).  And I have to hold contests for my credits, or just give my credits away?  You want to buy my credits, but only if I give some of them away first?

Of course, Entrecard has always been more valuable to those who have the time and energy to drop cards all day, to round up huge amounts of credits and hold contests to give them away, etc, etc.  But there was value in it for those of us with work, school, social lives, and, uh, blogging to do anyways.  I got a bunch of junk traffic, and a bunch of valuable traffic.  I got new eyes on my blogs.  I got comments.  But now, the value of the advertisements I place has been halved, since paid ads will show over mine 50% of the time, unless I, too, pay.

So, what motivation do I have to support paid ads on Entrecard? Whether or not I ever see a dime for showing paid ads on my site is completely uncertain.  It looks like if I become more active with Entrecard, I maybe, kind of, could see a few bucks.  But if I cash out the entirety of my credits right now (i.e. if they’d let me), I may be able to eat at McDonald’s.  Y’know, if trying to cash in credits weren’t enough to give me a heart attack.

News. Flash. I get more money than that from Google AdSense where I use it, and I don’t have to jump through hoops to get them to pay me.  I don’t have to run around visiting other AdSense sites and clicking on ads to get a return for the ad space I’m using myself.

Who would join Entrecard after this?  Here’s the pitch: “Put this widget on your blog.  We’ll show paid ads on it.  We might pay you for them, but, sorry, if you’re not going to play our little dropping game, you’ll be last on the list.  But why wouldn’t you want to participate?  Aren’t you a team player?  We’re all about community here.”

What makes Entrecard think it’s cool to push paid ads onto my site and say, “Hey, I’ll get you later”?  Entrecard was great as a community site where everything was about bloggers working together.  But this gradual change into a paid ad marketplace sucks, and the fact that it’s happening slowly has some bloggers excited about the idea that their credits could turn into cash.  So much so, that some people seem to be hoarding credits away rather than using them to keep the free half of the system moving.

I’m trying to have faith that this will work itself out, so I haven’t removed my widgets yet.  Maybe if I just reject paid ads and focus on the original intent of Entrecard, I’ll still get value from it.  Or, maybe the system will improve and I’ll eventually get some money from it.  Entrecard isn’t neccessarily doomed, but I don’t think they’re on the right track.  So, we’ll see.

I joined a community-driven, cooperative ad network.  Now I’m in a paid ad network.  And not a very good one.

The new dashboard on my Xbox Living blog.

The WordPress team has been busy, it seems.  It wasn’t that long ago that the WordPress Admin had design change, but this takes things further.  The buttons feel very Safari/Apple-inspired, but the interface still feels like WordPress.  I’m going to have to play around with it, but I’m finding it very easy to work with.  I haven’t struggled to find anything yet.

So far, I’m impressed.

This year, Blog Action Day will focus on another global problem: poverty.  Bloggers from around the world are called to write a post about the issue and publish it on October 15 to raise awareness of global poverty and work together to help the problem.

I’ve just registered Work, Web, Play to participate this year, and I’ll be writing on my other blogs where I can.   It looks like I made it into the first 100 sites to register.  Be sure to get your blog registered on blogactionday.org and join in the cause on October 15!

This year, it’d be great to see some more corporate blogs take part as well — social awareness is always a great trait to see from the corporate world.  This is a great opportunity to promote your business as a socially conscious, forward-thinking organization.

It took a few tries/revisions to find the best way to do this, so I thought I’d share my solution.  All I did was create a page with a specific slug (“sidebarpage”) and echo its content.  I used it in a sidebar widget, but you could use this anywhere in your WordPress Theme if you’d like to have an additional editable area.

Be sure that you’re creating a seperate WP_Query object ($sidebarpage in this example) — otherwise you’ll modify the query on the page itself, and your sidebar content will show up in the main body of your posts/pages as well!

The down-side of having this content stored in a page is that the page will appear in page listings, so be sure to exclude it if these are used in your theme.

Everyone’s really excited about Web 2.0. Still. That in itself isn’t a problem: there’s lots to be excited about. All this Web 2.0 stuff — social media, network building, picture posting, wiki writing, Twitter tweeting and all the other things bloggers do while high on AJAX — is making the Web into a much more collaborative, open and accessible medium. That was pretty much the point of the Web from the get-go, so kudos to them for the job well done.

But, talk has been growing over the past year about the future of this utopia we’re all building together — or at least, its business future. The analysts say the tides may be turning yet again: that Web 2.0 is forming a bulge of a bubble that’s about to burst at the seams.

And they’re probably right. If you look around, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a lot of noise going on. Of course, we’ve had Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Flickr and the great big blogosphere for a while now. But every day it seems I’m learning about some new Web 2.0 app and how it’s the best thing for me since sliced turkey. There are way too many social media sites out there, and I’m afraid that sitting in the middle of this with my Web Marketer and Web Developer hats on has gotten me awfully dizzy.

And while wearing those hats — yes, I wear actual hats — I’m often browsing freelancer sites looking for fun and exciting projects to work on. Without fail, there are daily postings from investors looking to build the next MySpace, Digg or i-silver-bullet. If not, they at least want a new Facebook app that will create the viral marketing their business always needed to get off the ground.

After the 2000 dot-com burst, this kind of if you build it they will come smack in the face of rationality came to a grinding halt, and the executives who didn’t smarten up were politely asked to die in a hole somewhere. Now, it seems like the coffers are opening up again to buy a piece of Web 2.0 pie.

Of course so many “Web 2.0″ companies are living off of traffic and ad revenue alone — but what about those using the Web to sell something tangible? My friends over at Sitebrand paint a brighter picture for those involved in online retail, where the Web may actually be the safer bet as the U.S. economy slows down.

Meanwhile, the clients I work with have all increased their online marketing spending over the past year or two — but every single one of them has become obsessed with their web metrics. Conversion rates, cost-per-lead and ROI are on the tops of their minds, and rightly so.

So it seems that at least some people have learned from the first dot-com burst, which is great because they’ll need to use that kind of sense again to search for new marketing tactics when the bubble bursts and Internet users worldwide simultaneously fall into comas.

I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is “smarten up, Internet”, because if everything goes to hell again the Web won’t be any more fun and I’ll have to get a new job.

Which presents a problem.  My personal blog has no focus, but I do come across plenty of ideas that I’d like to share and discuss.  And I need to record some of the things I’m doing, if only for my own memory.

So my previous blog, colintemple.com, is movng here.  The “Work, Web, Play” theme is coming with it, but I’ll be focusing on my work in the world of web marketing.  I’ll be sharing some ideas and successes, useful things I find, and challenges I come across (and hopefully resolve).

So, I’ll start with an introduction.  My name is Colin Temple and I’m a web marketer in Ottawa, Canada.  I’m self-employed: I left my full-time job last fall to kick my business into high gear.  I’m now working with businesses around the world on their marketing through my company, XAdvance.  I live in the suburbs with my wonderful wife and our severely annoying cat.

Leave a comment and link to your blog so I can hear your story, too.