I received the emailed announcement this morning, as all Entrecard members did, that the new toolbar has been released. Is this Sitehoppin? I went to the Entrecard post and read about the new toolbar. It sounded cool. I have a lot of toolbars installed in Firefox and wasn’t too thrilled to add another, but it’s Entrecard, so I made an exception.

The toolbar installed flawlessly, but only works in Firefox 2 and 3 (sorry, IE, Opera, Flock, and other browser fans). I now have the option to view new sites, with the ability to open ten or more at a time, buy ads directly from the site I’m visiting, ad sites to my favorites, brows different categories of blogs, give tips, recommendations, and much more all from my browser. Why did Buzz My Blog appear when I hit the play button with Newest selected? Oh, because I clicked newest blog under my favorites category. Needless to say it took a few minutes to get used to, but it gives me quick access to my profile, and even quicker access to blogs.

You can one click advertise from the toolbar. This means when you visit a site you’ll see the price of an ad listed to the far right in the toolbar. One click of this button and the advert goes into the queue. I tried it on a cheap site. So if I accidentally click the button, I then have to go to my ad queue and cancel the ad. I’m not sure how I feel about this. A second click to confirm might be nice. What do you think?

Verdict? I think it’s great. It might actually get me dropping regularly again. Was the announcement worth the wait? I think so, but who am I? (Sezwho?)

Week in Review

I’m back. I can’t believe I’ve been away this long. I took a vacation from blogging it seems. No reason, just working and getting things done in other areas. I missed this blog though, and all the readers. I can’t imagine selling. Can you? I think I’ve grown too attached to everything, the hours of piddling with the template, the logo, the branding, the thousands of EC drops to promote, the Project Wonderful ads, the comments, articles, all of it! So I’m back and in full effect. I’ll hopefully be doing a podcast soon too.

If you’re new to my site, I like to write about topics that can help bloggers, either to smile or to write on their blogs. I also post reviews of blogs, in my Powder Keg Review series. I’m going to do a review once a week for the month of August. If you want to be considered for the review, please leave a comment. It’s free. I’ll choose a different blog each week. No strings attached.

Explosions from around the Blogosphere

Aside from the awesome Entrecard announcement, there’s been of interesting things going on this week.

The Big Bald Blog continued his Advertising of Yesteryear series with an installment looking at Honda’s 1965 advertising campaign and their earlier You meet the nicest people on a Honda ad campaign. It’s a good read.

Dosh Dosh talked about the key to viral marketing being emotional engagement in a new article. On a side note, I just saw his new site design. Very simple and nice.

Other things happened during the week, like the Problogger site being banned from StumbleUpon. Did you write a fantastic post this week? I’ll be linking to quality writing and entertaining bits every Sunday, so feel free to drop a link in the comments or through Twitter.