This weekend’s giveaway is sponsored by FunnyCard.nl, an online shop run by BrendaP, who was addicted to Postcrossing but found it hard to find nice cards… so she decided to start her own shop!
Today she is offering a set of 25 Postcrossing themed cards to 2 lucky users!
To participate, have a look at Brenda’s shop and leave a comment below, with a greeting in your own language. We’ll randomly pick the two lucky commenters by this time next week. And have a nice weekend!
Ever since joining Kickstarter some weeks ago, we’ve been discovering more and more postal related projects. One that caught our eye is called POSTICK, and aims to help transform regular things, like photographs or flyers into postcards. We’ll let Tatjana Buisson, the project creator, explain her vision:
Postcards are “magic little things” indeed and these handy adhesive labels make it easier to turn lots of things into one! The project is quite popular and fully funded already, but until June 19th you can still sponsor it to receive your own pack of POSTICKs. The more people join in and support this project, the easier it will be for Tatjana to get things going – perhaps one day you’ll see these neat labels in a shop near you!
Check out Tatjana’s other postcard related projects on her website, Postcard Happiness.
You have probably come across some of the popular UNESCO World Heritage Sites postcards. The UNESCO Sites are some of the best places to travel to in the entire world and receiving a postcards from one of these sites is just as neat. But what is UNESCO, and how are the sites picked? We’ll try to answer some of those questions in this post.
UNESCO stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The UNESCO World Heritage program was born in 1952. It sought to identify and designate sites around the world that were significant in one of three areas: education, science or culture.
The reason UNESCO was founded was because of a need to safeguard ancient temples in Egypt in 1952. Egypt had decided to build the Aswan High Dam, but this was going to flood the ancient temples of Abu Simbel and Philae. The United Nations wanted to protect these sites and so the UNESCO World Heritage Sites program was started.
Many countries from the UN came to help out and protect the sites in Egypt, which led to other protection campaigns for various other sites throughout the world. In 1965, the United States championed a draft convention to start a World Heritage Trust, which would protect these scenic, natural and historic sites. This was eventually adopted by the UN in 1972.
Sites are chosen to become World Heritage Sites by nomination from the group of 180 countries, which are called the States Parties. Countries in the group nominate sites within their territory that they want included and then they are voted on based on various criteria. After meeting these criteria for cultural and historical significance, a site becomes an UNESCO World Heritage Site and is given resources for protection and preservation from the World Heritage Trust.
Today, there are more than 800 of these sites in many different countries all over the world. You can learn more about them on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites website.
Have you visited many UNESCO sites? Which one is your favourite? :)
A group of Taiwan members is organising the fourth Postcrossing meeting in their country – and they’ve been preparing a special surprise for the event… a Postcrossing cancellation mark!
The meetup will be held on May 26th, in the city of Taichung, in Central Tawain. The group was granted permission to set up a temporary Post Office, and use a custom-made cancellation mark, which was drawn by weital. Here’s how it will look:
Isn’t it exciting?
Dodd, the meeting organiser, and all the other attendants are happy to have the first special Postcrossing cancellation, and would like to share it with 50 postcrossers around the world!
Thank you to everyone who responded – the 50 postcards have all been assigned!
For more information on this event, please check the meetup’s forum page.
Russel, (aka SonOfBilly) joined Postcrossing when the project was barely starting, and hasn’t stopped sending postcards since then… as a result, he is the second user with most postcards sent in New Zealand!
Here is what he had to say to our interview questions:
As a young 10 year old boy, an American pen friend sent me a chain letter which promised me 1,000's of postcards if I sent one to the person at the top of the list, put my name at the bottom of the list and sent the chain letter to 5 other people. My Mother said it wouldn’t work and guess what, she was right.
I now travel a lot on business, mainly throughout Asia and in particular China. I have been travelling in China now for 31 years. While travelling I have always sent postcards home to my family and extended family.
Back in 2005, not long after Postcrossing started my ISP sent out a newsletter showing interesting sites and “Postcrossing” was one of them. I immediately joined and have been hooked ever since.
I even try to send postcards while I travel. I also stock up on postcards by buying them in China, Hong Kong and have recently discovered a marvelous bookshop in Taipei called Eslite that has a great selection of postcards from around the world.
Sport plays a dominant part of my lifestyle. I maintain my fitness by walking an hour a day, up to 5 days per week.
Work commitments mean I don’t have a lot of spare time but I always find time to keep in regular contact with my old High School friends with regular dinner evenings. I also watch most of my favourite sports on TV such as Rugby, Rugby League, Soccer (or Football as most of the rest of the world knows it), Motorsport (especially WRC, Formula 1, MotoGP & Superbikes) Tour de France, Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games.
Have been a season ticket holder of the New Zealand Warriors ever since they entered the Australian Rugby League competition back in 1995.
Luke, our “Postie” who delivers our mail, rain, shine or hail 6 days a week.
I buy my stamps from the NZ Post shop in the central shopping street of Auckland called Queen Street. The shop is called “Real Aotearoa”. Aotearoa is the maori name for New Zealand and means “Land Of The Long White Cloud”. The photo shows my friendly assistant.
This is our very basic letter box.
This is where I post most of my postcards, on the way to work most mornings, outside our local BP petrol station.
One of my favourite postcards was the very first one I received. It is black and white and shows the streets of Canton in China. Now called Guangzhou, it is the City I would visit the most in China. I enjoy all of the postcards I receive but a couple that stand out were of The Great Wall of China, The Colosseum, the Taichung Jazz Festival, Soccer World Cup 2010 and Finnish Nature.
The sending means more than the receiving. I like to try and and match up the receivers requests with my closest equivalents. I enjoy getting a big thank you when the postcard is received and knowing that it is really appreciated.
I also enjoy finding out more information about the postcard I have received. I will try and add more information to the postcard, either when it is scanned or within a couple of weeks of having received the card. If you have sent me a postcard, please check the image to see if the information is correct.
I sent 2 postcards to Tuvalu. The first one was posted from China and my guess is that perhaps they didn’t realise it was a country, so it never arrived. Located in the Pacific, halfway between Australia and Hawaii they were formerly known as the Ellice Islands. Its population of 10,500 makes it the third-least populous sovereign state in the world, with only Vatican City and Nauru having fewer inhabitants. Because of the low elevation, the islands that make up this nation are threatened by current and future sea level rise.
The only issue that I take a real interest in at the moment is the world wide decline in mailing. The drop globally between 2008 to 2010 was 14% with one notable exception being China which continues to experience growth but from a relatively low base.
Mailing is expected to decline a further 43% by 2020.
For example in New Zealand mail volumes declined 6.7% in 2009. Slowed to a 4.9% reduction in 2010 but at the same time 7,200 new addresses were added to the delivery network bringing the total network to 1.9 million addresses. This meant the Post was delivering 20% less mail per address than they did 3 years ago.
