Another competition winner

April 3, 2008 – 12:50 pm

We closed the first phase of the reviews competition a few weeks ago but we were so blown away by the review by Alx Cahiz of the stunning Dervish Longboard that we had to give him a prize.

This wasn’t just review of the week, I think it was review of the month! Looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with. It should also be said that TeamGearedUp is one of the best blogs out there about outdoor sports and activities.

We’ll be kicking off the next phase of the competition very shortly and we’re totally open to suggestions on the type of prizes.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

LouderVoice Wordpress Plug-in Version 2

March 30, 2008 – 1:26 pm

We’ve been promising it forever and now we’re finally ready to unveil the all-new LouderVoice Wordpress plug-in V2.0. This enables you to write reviews on your blog using an open standard called hReview. Sites like LouderVoice can then index and interpret them more intelligently than raw blog-posts.

The new plug-in is a total re-write based on lots of user feedback and, in particular, some fantastic suggestions and guidance from Robin Blandford.

The all new look

So what’s changed? Everything!

  • It is compatible with Wordpress.org from V2.0.3 to the brand new V2.5
  • It now integrates into the normal blog-post editor instead of being a pop-up
  • The extra markup is no longer stored inline in the blog-post body so there is no danger of damaging the extra review information if you go back to edit a post
  • We’ve dropped the summary field and just use the first paragraph of the body as the summary
  • LouderVoice tags are optional, we can make use of tags from all the major tagging systems on Wordpress including the built-in one
  • The plug-in pings LouderVoice when you post a new review. Indexing of new reviews should therefore be faster
  • The rating stars are stored locally in the plug-in dir so you can easily change them to suit yourself

What hasn’t changed? It is still microformats compliant and it is still GPL, so hack away if you want to change anything.

A big thanks to John Blackbourn for all the development effort.

Download it from here and please let us know what you think. Heck, why not review it :-)

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

What is LouderVoice V2 all about?

March 30, 2008 – 8:57 am

We quietly launched V2 of our LouderVoice on the night before the Irish Blog Awards and have been tweaking for a few weeks. There is a lot more to come but we thought it’d be good to let you know what has changed now since we have a few more announcements coming in the next few days.

The main aim with V2 was to make the activity on the site much more visible to the users and provide more opportunities to interact with others on the site. The most obvious change (apart from the very sexy re-design by Doepud) in that area is that all of the latest/best reviews are visible on every page you visit. We have also added the ability to follow other reviewers so that all of their activity is visible on your logged-in home page on the site.

The number one request from users was the ability to write reviews directly on the site. There are many times when your blog or micro-blog just isn’t the appropriate place to write a particular review and we now support on-site reviewing with Google Maps integration, item images and the ability for others to comment on your reviews. You can now finally save drafts too.

One neat feature is that if you send an SMS review to the site, you can add mapping and image information to it later. Speaking of SMS reviews, you can now sign-up automatically on the site via SMS by simply sending your first review.

Other goodies include avatar image support, a simplified useful/not_useful voting system, lots of small improvements and a more scalable back-end. Of course, as always, we support the collection/publishing of reviews from all the major blog platforms and collection from Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce.

Our popular Wordpress plug-in has been totally redesigned from scratch and is a huge improvement. We’ll launch that in the next day or two when test is complete on Wordpress 2.5.

What’s coming next? We still have a bunch of buglets to fix and then we’ll be adding improvements to the commenting system, activity stream and some of the RSS feeds on the site. We will add support for some video sites very shortly and some of the Social Networking sites after that.

We are going live very soon with our API on a major partner site. Our SMS customer feedback system with dedicated keywords is also live and you can expect some announcements there too in the short term.

And you wondered why we had been so quiet here!

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Features | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Irish Blog Awards Winners

March 3, 2008 – 10:10 am

Well done to all the winners at the Irish Blog Awards on Saturday. A wonderful night was had by everyone and our only disappointment was that we didn’t get to meet Fatmammycat who won in the LouderVoice-sponsored Best Blog Post category with her incredibly moving post on fox hunting.

The success of the awards every year is down to one man, Damien Mulley. Thanks again for another memorable night.

Here is the full list of winners:

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

Blog Awards Best Post Finalists

February 27, 2008 – 7:39 pm

The finalists for the Best Blog Post at the 2008 Awards have been announced. Looking forward to meeting them all on Saturday.

Hope we see some interesting schwag on the night too!

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Chips in Tipp

February 27, 2008 – 10:11 am

Bernie Goldbach, well known blogger/journalist/lecturer/consultant got some teenagers to recommend chippers in Tipperary by SMS. We now have 7 of the top Chips in Tipp on LouderVoice. What’s your favourite?

Chips

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Reviewing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

LouderVoice Version 2 is very very close

February 26, 2008 – 9:40 am

We’ve been working round the clock to get the next version of LouderVoice out the door. We are within a hair’s breadth now! What can you expect to see?

  • A big redesign with a much busier home page to enable you to explore the site more easily
  • Reviews and comments in-site so you no longer need a blog to write full reviews
  • Review images
  • Instant sign-up
  • Instant sign-up via SMS
  • Community features enabling you to follow other users and see their activity on the site
  • Avatar images
  • Review Drafts
  • A new voting system
  • Major improvements to tag navigation
  • Basic support for Google Maps
  • A faster search back-end
  • And a ton of other under the hood improvements

Keep an eye out, we know you’re going to like it.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Releases | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Today is Wine Blogging Wednesday

February 13, 2008 – 11:48 am

We hope you have your bottle of Italian Red ready. The challenge is to write a review of it in just seven words! All the details on how to send your review to LouderVoice are here. Leave a comment if you have any questions.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Reviewing | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Newspaper Coverage

February 11, 2008 – 8:21 pm

We were delighted to get two pieces on LouderVoice in the Irish Examiner newspaper recently. On Friday Feb 1st, Bernie Goldbach did a great column focused on mini-reviewing which he re-posted on his blog.

Then on Monday 4th, Dan MacCarthy published an extensive interview with Conor the LouderVoice CEO. As there is no online copy, I have uploaded a scan of it. Apologies for the roughness of the scan and for not OCRing it. The photograph is by Denis Minihane. Click on picture to see high-res original.

Irish Examiner coverage of LouderVoice

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Business | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Irish Blog Awards, Best Post 2008 Shortlist

February 11, 2008 – 4:41 pm

The shortlist for this category has just been published over on the awards blog. We encourage you to check them all out since they show the fantastic variety and quality in Irish blogging over the past year.

Well done to all the nominees, we’re can’t wait to see who makes it through to the final!

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Blogging | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
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