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I don’t know whether you know about Yu-Gi-Oh!, that card playing Japanese anime but I think the web 2.0 fell in love with it. Now you’ve got card directories to showcase your online presence. Bla.st is one of such services.

Bla.st is an online directory collecting sites and services in different categories which are represented by an image, therefore its card. You can browse through this vast repertoire of card from the bla.st site itself or get randomly displayed cards on your site fitting particular category which you can choose. Clicking on a card will bring you to the blog or service it’s representing. To receive maximum clicks you can pay to have your cards at the higher position on the bla.st homepage, put it in a unique category that many people might visit and naturally having an attractive and well designed card.

First you create an account and start uploading your card which should be an image of 270×165 pixels in size @ 72dpi in the GIF, JPEG or PNG format. Help has been provided to get your card ready with ready made templates(which are just blank images of that size) and tips on how to export your image to abide by the requirements. Do note the rules that bla.st impose on the type of cards you’re displaying and the service it’s linking to since you can’t have for e.g pictures portraying arms,sex or drugs. That may disappoint my bro Waz whom I’m sure, wanted a nude lady,smoking a pot with a super destructive weapon as card lol(*just joking*)

Cards can promote anything from sites, services, competition/contests,products or an event. The cards are classified in different sections which are the categories/tags they belong to. So make sure to put a proper Categories/Tags for your card that will allow it to have the highest position but do also put famous Categories/Tags to get it listed on those sections that are the most visited. You can see a concise list of the recent famous categories/tags from the bla.st homepage’s sidebar.

While creating your card, you’ll also see a Time Online input box that will allow you to choose the duration of your bid. If you’re advertising something, then you want it to have the maximum exposure. You can do so by getting your card at the top position on the bla.st homepage. This is where the gaming part enters. Hover over any card on the homepage and an info bubble will appear displaying the site’s name,tagline and the amount the owner is paying per day for that position.

To get his position, just put more on your card than he’s doing. If you want to pay less but have the highest position, just put your time online duration as a small value and your rate per day will be higher which will ultimately put you at the top position on bla.st frontpage easily.

For regular bloggers, I see the extra advantage of having a random cute blogroll on your blog. Unlike MyBlogLog widget which displays recent visitors avatar that will bring you to that person’s account on MyBlogLog, having the bla.st widget on your blog will display random cards from particular categories you choose and when people click on them, they are directly carried to the blog. So if you want some random blogs on the blogging subject displayed, just add this as the main category when creating your widget which is simple javascript that you’ll need to place on your blog, your sidebar might be a good choice. Also when you are displaying the widget, you become automatically a referral, when anyone click on a card, sign with bla.st and add money to their card, you’ll receive a commission from that. Pretty generous from them when they are already offering a great image-type blogroll.

Bla.st is in the end a service offering the best of both worlds, to advertisers willing to showcase their site and bloggers who just want to have a clean set of randomly displayed sites according to their favourite topics of interest on their blog.

Help more bloggers join bla.st and get to discover more random blogs according to your topic of interest. Link to blast, blog about it(which will also entail you to have a higher card position), digg it, tell your friends about it. Forget Poker or BlackJack, get onto online card playing today with bla.st. Do provide your feedbacks on the service through the comments.

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