…And a lot has happened, but here are a few things that were particularly interesting:

1. Major linkage, but two hat-tips in particular were heavy drivers of traffic (and blips in the “new artists signing” on category). These would be boingboing.net and kotaku.com.

2. Folks from the Encyclopedia of Life contacted us pretty much within 8 hours of the Phylo project being showcased on Boingboing. Best of all, was the fact that they wanted to talk about collaboration. Hence, the redesign on our part to include a very visible EOL link in all of our species cards (as well as the wiki link). Somewhere along the line, people also thought it would be cool to include a youtube video if possible. We agree.

As far as the EOL showcasing the cards, we’ve hit a copyright snag in that we have a no-derivative license on the cards for those artists who only want their image shown in the phylo card context (necessary for us to get a larger number of these awesome images). EOL has a strict “share alike” policy, but we’re working to see if there’s a way around this (i.e. show the card on EOL, but without the image, or with a watermark of some sort, etc).

3. A new version of the v1 rules went up on April 22nd, and already has gone through the ringer from many angles. In fact, one person even went so far as to demonstrate its flaws by suggesting an unbeatable deck! We should have a third incarnation of the v1 rules going up soon.

4. Many many kind requests to try the game out with kids! Even though the game isn’t quite there yet, this is still wonderful to see.

5. Twitter has been particularly good to the Phylo project. In fact, via Twitter, Margaret Atwood has requested the horseshoe crab card. Lo and behold, we have two horseshoe crab images [1 | 2] – the card should be coming very soon.

6. Invitation to write a piece about the project for the Kyoto Journal. This publication will be hand delivered to all delegates at the COP10 conference.

7. As we speak, we currently have enough artwork for 102 cards. This includes 4 new microbes which have yet to appear on the graphic’s pool (two bacteria and two virus). The plan is to release everything we have by May 22nd – the International Biodiversity Day! This way, the revamped rules will be up, a whole bunch of cards are up, and therefore some serious game testing can commence!

8. Dave Ng recently gave a talk about the Phylo project at Northern Voice 2010 (a personal blogging and social media conference based in Vancouver). Some recollections can be seen at the following links [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Good follow ups with potential leads on GPS tagging game additions.

9. Sounds like the UBC Office of Learning Technologies would like to kick up the utility of the wordpress theme. Possible updates include (1) allowing self directed card making (rather than via editorial oversight as it currently is); (2) production of a generic trading card version, which would work for a card game of “any topic.” (mineral cards, atmospheric sciences cards were actually mentioned).

10. And, last but not least, “phylo” (the game) seems to be in the top ten for most google searches these days (although the pastry is still king!)