Goose Joak Originals - Almost Live for 2010! Innovations Abound

In 2009, we had 904 cards in the Goose Joak set.  Check that -- with a last minute Rockies addition prior to Spring Training (one example is above), we're now up to 945!  Either way, you guys impressed me a ton, and it was a lot of fun.  

Carlos Gonzalez, Colorado Rockies

2009 Goose Joak Original

by Val

My one regret in all of that was that I had a hard time getting all of the cards exposure.  As you can imagine, with 900+ cards, that's a lot of blog posts that never happened.  So in 2010 I'm applying a few lessons learned.  

1. Make it easier to share

So this year, cards will be shared in real time, as soon as they are posted to Flickr.  You probably noticed the swirling card widget at the top of the blog now, and this will be the primary mechanism for making sure all cards get exposure on the blog.  As soon as you upload your card to Flickr, it goes into an RSS feed and goes right to the top of this blog.  The widget displays something 15 or 20 of the most recent cards.  Clicking on any of the cards will take you to the rest of the collection. 

I'll still periodically go through and highlight some of my favorite cards within blog posts.  That's not going away, but realistically I just can't do a post for every single card.  So the widget ensures that every card gets some face time on the blog.  Plus, Flickr has an active community and I wouldn't be surprised to get some interest from there as well.

Nick Punto, Twins

2010 Goose Joak Original

by Goose Joak

2. Make it easier to create

I also intend to make it easier and more flexible.  Rather than assigning teams to specific users like last year, I am posting all templates -- everything -- to a website for download.  So this way everyone has flexibility.  There's no up front commitment, so you can do just one card of your favorite player, or you could do several 40 man rosters and all the NRI.  Or you can just take a look around and try your hand at a few.  I want to invite people into this and give everybody a shot.

Within the next week, I'll wrap up the logistics and then really open this up.  In the meantime, if you send me your email address, I'll grant you access to the download site for all 30 templates.  Right now there are three templates up, but I'll be rolling more of them out as well go, prioritizing the ones people are asking for.

3. Make it even more friendly for obscure autographs

I got a lot of good feedback from autograph collectors last year, particularly collectors of obscure players.  I hadn't really considered the potential for that when making the set.  But now that I know, I should probably cater to it! 

To make it even easier this year, cards will come in standard card sizes.  So you don't have to resize when printing (though some of these "beta" cards have yet to be resized).


Secondly, I'll be debuting three versions of each template.  That way if it is hard to find a good picture of the obscure player in question, we can find ways to work around it.

One version "looks" the best, with two pictures on the front, like the Punto shown above.

However, for more obscure players, it can be difficult to come by decent photos sometimes.  So we can opt for a version with one photo and a team logo.  Bad choice of player to illustrate my point, but hopefully you get what I mean by it:

Barry Zito, Athletics
2010 Goose Joak Original
by Goose Joak

Finally, sometimes the best you can do is a super grainy 150x150 image of a guy's back.  But you still want to get his card autographed, right?  Well, introducing something totally different:

Cody Clark, Royals
2010 Goose Joak Original
by Goose Joak

It's different, yes, but I actually kind of like it.  You could certainly put a nice clear black sharpie on that one, and it gives you a chance to have a card of a player you otherwise couldn't.

Eager to see what people gravitate toward, but I think there is something for everyone.

More to come!