LouderVoice: Reviewing the Review Tool
I recently posted a review about Webconverger, and to do this I used the LouderVoice technology. Today I do a review of this technology using their own system. LouderVoice really sounds like a good idea.
Review of LouderVoice
Rated as /5 on May 19 2007 by Cristiano Betta
Now, posting this first review didn’t work that well. First of all I didn’t get that I had to actually subscribe LouderVoice to the FourStarters RSS feed, in contrary to having their service login to the Wordpress install (which is also an option). After I fixed this the review somehow still didn’t show up, which was (very professionally) solved within a day by Conor (founder) himself. Somehow they hadn’t thought of the fact that our RSS feed goes through FeedBurner and this broke their system. It all works fine now as you can see when you go to my review page.
LouderVoice is a technologically well implemented product, using the hReview MicroFormat and providing serveral ways to publish your reviews (bookmarklets, WordPress-plugins, on their site, etc). They only recently launched and I have been informed that they already had alot of feedback on how to improve the system. I, for example, think they should make it easier to add old reviews (like my N95 review, which isn’t present in our RSS feed anymore so won’t show up in their system). I think they will release all these small features that have been suggested in due time. I think that if more of us start using the tool and spamming them with ideas, the earlier they will add the features.
There isn’t that much content on LouderVoice yet, but it obviously takes time to build a good basis. I will start using their tool more often on FourStarters as we are used to doing reviews of website and applications. If you want, you can now go and rate the quality of this review here, or signup and start doing reviews on your own blog.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
May 20th, 2007Totally agree, it’s a great idea.
From what I can tell, they need popularity. Fortunately, it seems to me that reviews are easy to heuristically find. Write a bot that trawls technorati or other blog aggregators for review-like constructions and automatically add them, perhaps? The resultant traffic should probably cause it to show up in server stats, which tips bloggers off about the existence of LouderVoice. Bloggers are early adopters; if it works the rest will follow.
Once LouderVoice is popular, the next job will be eliminating shill blogs. Given the sheer number of spam blogs out there this is a real concern. This one is going to be a little more difficult.
http://claimid.com/conoro http://claimid.com/conoro
May 20th, 2007Thanks for the great review Cristiano. Our future feature-set wiki page is getting longer and longer!
Reinier, at the moment we don’t want to go down the random scraping route. I’ve never found any of the existing sites that take such an approach to be very useful as it is impossible to find the good content amongst all the rubbish and spam.
We prefer to grow the site more slowly with strong blog content rather than spending our days fighting spam and splogs. Our job over the next few months is to evangelise both the site and hreview in general.
One down-side of taking the registration approach is that some commenters (like Mashable) have confused us with general blog networks. We really don’t see it like that, any more than Technorati’s “claim your blog” feature makes you part of their blog network.
Love the feedback!
http://claimid.com/conoro http://claimid.com/conoro
May 20th, 2007I hope I’m not turning into a comment spammer!
One aspect of the site which we have not highlighted sufficiently is that it is fully internationalised. You can define the default language you write in and the languages you want to search in. Our search back-end (Lucene) handles proper language stemming for most major languages.