28 posts tagged “cards”

My first ever home-made postcard. Should I quit my day job yet?

Shot In Real Time

Made it into the top-10 card senders in Israel. 167 cards in less than a year. Yeeha!

There's a curious feature in Postcrossing, a feature that users can activate or deactivate at will. It's called "send to repeated countries". It's relatively new. According to the FAQ page that explains it, enabling this feature will cause Postcrossing to stop trying to diversify your random card destinations. Instead of sending mail to as many countries as possible, it will target the "heavy hitters", i.e. countries with most active users and most sent cards. They claim that checking this box will help the system maintain balance, without disturbing the diversity of postcards being sent to you. This is very important, because nobody wants to see images of USA and Finland time and again, right?

In any case, I selected this feature a couple of months ago, and tried to analyze the effect. First of all, you see a dramatic increase in American, German and Finnish destinations. This could be expected, as they are the most intensive Postcrossing users. Second, the far-east countries disappear almost completely. You rarely get China, Taiwan or Japan. There is no visible effect on received cards, so they're keeping their promise. All in all, the card turnaround increased from around 15 per month to 25, which is good for me (more sent = more received).

But the greatest benefit of all is this: you finally get to send cards to people who can understand English! I am sure that Chinese and Japanese people come with the best of intentions, but their level of English is usually pretty basic. I don't even dare to use cursive, as there's no chance in hell they'll give the back of the card a second glance. All in all, I'm happy with it. The Jane Smiths and Matti Virtanens can expect to get more Israeli cards in the near future.

What a cool user profile! I'm gonna write to him in Hebrew.
*evil grin*

Update: The newbies are restless...

Mysterious Japanese Card

This is a card I got today from someone named Danna, or Dianna maybe. The writing style is very informal, as if we've known each other for ages. However, no matter how hard I try, I can't figure out who this person is. Can this be a Postcrossing card without an ID? Hard to tell. Nice card though.

This is a relatively new one, dating August 17th, 1981. Amir and Dolly went to Norway, and write back home. Amir's brother is affectionately called Baga, or something like that.

To Baga: I am sending this card to our parents, so you, mom and dad, can also have a chance to read it. We are staying at a youth hostel named Geilo, about 200km East of Bergen. Yesterday we took the car on a long road trip through the countryside, and came out of some fjords, that are at the ends of rivers that flow to the sea, or create inland lakes. Today we're leaving, and going to stay in Bergen, also at a youth hostel (we have reservations). About our car: Baga, leave the car at the parking lot (the free one) on the evening of September the 1st. Leave the keys at the back, under the rubber of the spare wheel. Don't lock the back door of the trunk (just set it down). I'll take the car early Monday morning. See ya, from Amir and Dolly.

Remember all this is written on a postcard. I hope Amir indeed found the car waiting for him when he got back to Kfar Saba.