Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

August 2002

Dutch Society Calls

Stamp collectors studying Dutch stamps will be happy to know that the Nederlandse Vereniging van Postzegel Verzamelaars Afdeling Nijmegen has opened a Website, which they set up to try and start a network on online societies to help them share information and articles.

NVPV (Nijmegen chapter)
http://www.nvpvnijmegen.nl

Currently, the site is only in Dutch, but I enjoyed it using a simple web page translator, one of the few that does English-Dutch.

Tranexp.com
http://www.translator.cx

Hong Kong Logs In

Likewise, the Hong Kong Study Circle is now online. They are a repository for philately and postal history of Hong Kong and China's Treaty Ports. The site is new and currently only a contact site, but it's good place to jump into this philatelic area.

Hong Kong Study Circle
http://www.hongkongstudycircle.com/

Webmasters take note that the HKSC list of e-mail contacts is a graphic in order to thwart a spammer's robots from filching the addresses for their mass mailings. An elegant idea I haven't seen in a long, long time.

Page-by-page

Stamp collecting needs people, and how to show people what they're missing seems to be our Holy Grail. There are many good ideas to reinforce existing programs and plans, but though cadres of club officers and dedicated specialists are ready to share their stamp collecting experience with newcomers, there just don't seem to be very many new collectors turning up.

Though our once and future stamp collectors are out there, stacked up like bricks in a brickyard, how to find and reach potential collectors seems to be the problem. And though we need to build the hobby brick-by-brick, philately could use a couple of tons of bricks for our cadres to work on right now.

Segway to "Lilo and Stitch," this summer's animated film from Disney, which is set in Hawaii. The state's tourism and convention bureau saw the movie as their brickyard, and Hawaii served its marketing and public relations to a receptive audience of "Lilo and Stitch" movie-goers.

Hawaii knew people would be receptive to learning more about Hawaii, and they were ready to satisfy people's curiosity and extend an invitation. If you want to reach people, you have to go to where the people are, and today they're in front of their PC's and TV's and at the movies. Though movie tie-in's are out of the question for most of us, we all can do a little cross-topic promotion on our websites. Here's a simple example.

Choose a simple topic like "Christmas,"  "Greta Garbo" or "baseball." Then write a 1200-word story about the topic and how it relates to and has been portrayed on stamps. Be sure to illustrate it with some colorful scans of pertinent stamps. Remember your writing for non-stamp collectors, so deal with stamps in broad terms.

Divide the story over three web pages for fast loading and easy reading, and be sure that you optimize those pages for search engine placement. The pages should include links to the APS and other stamp collecting sources where a receptive newbie could learn more and get connected.

Upload to your server. Submit to the search engines, and e-mail webmasters about your new story. If you wrote about stamps and baseball, ask baseball websites to link to your story or to write about it on their site.

Of course for increased punch you could do a movie cross-topic and focus on the movie "Titanic" and the stamps related to that night to remember, but for maximum effect you'd actually write a story about the subject of Hollywood's next projected blockbuster and find an angle about how it relates to stamps.

Let's see. If this is August, then you should be thinking about this Christmas' movie buzz, which in 2002 include a Star Trek, a Tolkein, a Scorsese, and Bob Fosse's Chicago.

Upcoming Movie Releases
http://movies.yahoo.com/upcoming/

Surf Safely.

The Glassine Surfer archives and links are online at the Glassine Surfer website, and you're invited to the Sociable Stamp Society chats on Sundays and Wednesdays at 8pm. Come to the site and click on "chat".

The Glassine Surfer
http://www.glassinesurfer.com

Thanks for reading the Glassine Surfer, and remember to support your local stamp club.