Midnight November 20th my contest officially ends.  For those who want to enter at the last minute, you can read about all the rules here.  All you have to do it link to me on your blog using the words “turnip and social networking” as the anchor text.  Then post on the comment page.

PRIZES

• Debbie from Wisdom Hypnosis is offering a Living The Lucky Life audio mp3 download, a $21.77 value.
• Foolsville 2.0 has pledged 10 bucks paypal and 5000 ec’s (Ed. Note: I think he means Entrecard credits)
• Fragileheart.com is donating a prize package consisting of 5,000ec and two blackberry pearl skins. One is red, the other is a coffee (with milk) colour.

Let’s not forget the original Prizes.

1st place: A Maxtor ONE TOUCH 4 Mini External 80gb Hard Drive. New, never opened, still in the box, It’s been sitting around my room for over a year. Backup or transport your data. Comes with USB 2.0 cable, Maxtor Safety Drill Recovery CD, and the Drive itself. Windows and Mac compatible. A $40 value on eBay last I looked.

2nd place: 10,000 Impressions on the CMF ADS Network donated by Stan at Fantasy Baseball Advice. A $25 value now, in November this will have a $36 value. Get your site or product noticed on over 20 quality websites. Ad must fit in with the CMF AD guidelines to be approved. Banner size is 123×125pixels.

3rd prize: A Turnip of Power T-shirt available in the size of your choice. Normally a $15 value when I offer them for sale. Expertly printed by East Side Tees. Each shirt is 100% pure cotton, Gildan brand. Black short sleeved t-shirt, printed in 2 colors, featuring the Turnip logo on the front, with the words “Turnip of Power” below.

The Rules:

1. Subscribe to my RSS feedand create a new link on your blog linking to any page at turnipofpower.com, including this contest page. The anchor text must contain the words “Social Networking”. For example: Turnip of Power writes many posts about Entrecard and social networking. Notice how the above example links to http://turnipofpower.com/category/social-networking/. By varying the page linked to, I’m hoping to spread pagerank over the entire site. Blogroll links are allowed, as long as the link mentions social networking. For example: Turnip of Power | Social Networking
2. Post a comment in this thread or below this update post with a link to the page containing your back link. One comment per entry, one entry per blog. If you have more than one blog, you may enter more than once.
3. Winners will be chosen at midnight on November 20th 2008 using random.org
   

CMF ADS is running a great little Holiday Special.  Get a featured review, backlinks and 8,000 ad impressions.  Combined with geotargetting, you can’t beat this offer.  The review alone is worth the $20.  Details below:

For Advertisers who spend $20 or more in advertising between November 12 until January 1st, 2009, the following special offer will be available:

• Advertising at a $2.50 per 1000 pageviews.*
• A free review of their site/product on the CMF ADS Feature Website Page.  Review will contain at least one link back to the advertiser’s landing page, as well as at least one image linking to the site.
• All existing advertisers who renew campaigns during this time period will be able to renew at this special rate.

*All banners and landing pages subject to approval.  Individual blogs in the network have to right to reject any ad.

The tale that Monkey never told is the one everyone wants to hear.  For the last 8 months his blog Monkey Fables And Tales was the most popular blog at Entrecard.  Then 2 days ago his blog suddenly vanished from Blogspot with the following message “Sorry, the blog at monfat48.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.”  As the twitter airwaves buzz with more questions than answers, let’s look at the two explanations given.

First the explanation given by Where The Hell Was I in this forum post.  Author Charlie Hatton claims Monkey Tales stole all his posts.  Doing my share of the legwork, I find Charlie’s claims to be true.  He is an established net personality and his posts pre-date Monkey’s posts by years.  There is no way he manufactured a fake Internet identity as a prank on Monkey Tales.

Monkey’s side of the story:  Before hearing the above accusation, I messaged Monkey Tale via Entrecard and asked him what happened.  Here is his message quoted in it’s entirety.  My apologies to anyone insulted by me posting an email without permission, but I no longer have any way to contact the author.

From: Monkey Fables And Tales

I’ve decided that EC isn’t for me any more. (And unlike others who quit, I decided I didn’t need a dramatic exit with a post condemning the place.)

I’m putting all blogging on hold for awhile as well since it appears the business I work for is having a rough go of it with the economy spiraling down.

(We sell high end beds and accessories and I’m going to put more time and effort into that right now in an effort to get sales back on track, which my boss would appreciate.)

Mike”

Who to believe?  While not a personal friend off Monkey Tale, I always liked the guy.  He seemed to be a stand up guy in an Internet world of scammers and spammers.  More than once I read forum posts of his complaining about “crap” written by other people.   Yet, I have to look at the Google evidence.  Almost every post was stolen.

Why it gets weirder:

• Monkey Tales did not have a single ad on his blog.  Not even AdSense.  He made no money from his actions
• Monkey had many blogs in the system, all written for the purpose of generating credits to advertise for his main blog.
• Monkey dropped many cards per day, probably 1300-1500 each and every day.
• Monkey’s blog was a blogspot domain, he couldn’t even sell the domain name in the end.

So, did Monkey Tales fool all the people all the time?   If he did, I think an apology to the original authors he stole from and to his readers is in order.  Either way, I welcome him to contact me and I will post either his apology or rebuttal to the accusations.  In the end, I’m not really angry at Monkey. For the first time he actually made me laugh.

Is Entrecard going the way of the Titanic?  The lack of activity in the Entrecard Forums sure makes it seem that way.  But is that the whole story?  How about taking a look at the actual dropping numbers.  Let’s go to the video tape!

Above is a chart of the activity of Entrecard users on my droplist who reciprocated drops for the previous two 30 day periods.  Since I always drop on these people without fail, this creates a good indicator of who drops on me regardless of whatever method each person uses. 

The stats:

October’s droplist had 250 members on it.  November’s total is 238.  Since members always come and go, a loss of 12 active members is hardly cause for alarm.  But let’s look more closely at the activity of those 238 droppers.  Those who dropped 11-30 cards a month greatly decreased.  Those that dropped 2-10 increased sharply, going from 44 people to a total of 64.  Those that dropped 0-1 were removed from my list, 12 in total.   That shift of 32 people out of 250 is significant.  Not only are members posting less often in the forums, they are dropping fewer cards.  Sure, blame it on the economy or election doldrums, but I don’t see it that way.

Conclusion:  Despite a downshift in activity and enthusiasm among Entrecard’s members, Entrecard is not finished as a network.  It still accomplishes it’s main goal of bringing like minded bloggers together.  As long as Entrecard delivers the traffic it won’t disappear.  There are enough members who don’t care about who runs it, how it is run, or even if it becomes 100% spam.  Eventually the last two mods will leave, spam will return, and the forums will be a ghost town.   But as long as the servers continue to function, the service will exist.

That’s a big “IF”:  Entrecard still has not properly monetized itself, and VC’s who once saw promise now see it as yesterdays news.  Venture Capital has not dried up, just dried up for Entrecard.  Eventually Graham Langdon may just sell it to break even, much like he did with the Million Dollar Wiki.  His insistence of “being around for the new owners” is actually a deal breaker given his current unpopularity among his own users.  Fixing the forums and adding a proper support network won’t bring back the old users.  The OIO ads currently funding Entrecard are losing interest among advertisers.  He’s down to 7 OIO advertisers now.  Is $350 from OIO plus the $10 he probably makes from AdSense a month enough to cover server costs?  Maybe. 

Could Graham or new ownership turn things around?  Short answer is “no”.  It would require a lot of ideas, coding, volunteer help, and a wealth of new/returning users.  Nobody I know that stopped dropping cards misses that aspect.  So how can Entrecard appeal to the casual user?  It can’t unless somebody major partners with it.  And by major, I mean Google, Yahoo, or WordPress.  It could save itself by allowing non-blogs to join, and then recruit the whole facebook/myspace crowd, but it may even be too late for that.

In other news: Read  information about Turnip’s Drop List, download the droplist itself, or sign up for the free CMF DIRECT beta.  That way if Entrecard ever disappears, people can still find your Entrecard image or blog.