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)

Fourth Competition Winner

February 11, 2008 – 3:57 pm

The fourth week of the competition (and final week of this phase) is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.

Congratulations to Ciarán Rooney, an Irish guy living in London, who wins with his complimentary review of AerLingus.com phone customer support. The review, which he wrote on Jaiku, currently tops Google for “Aer Lingus Support”.

aerlingus02

Keep an eye out for the next competition phase which we should be announcing shortly.

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

Going to 3GSM? Live Review it!

February 10, 2008 – 11:48 am

Pat Phelan from Cubic Telecom came up with the great idea of getting attendees to review what catches their eye at 3GSM in Barcelona from Feb 11th to 14th. So if you are going, we’d love to get your insights via any of the review methods we support. Just follow these easy steps:

  • Sign-up to LouderVoice if you haven’t already
  • In “My Settings” add as many of these sources as you like:
    • Mobile phone number for SMS reviews
    • Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce accounts for microblog mini-reviews
    • Blog RSS feed for Flag Tag Reviews
  • Then you send reviews as follows:

On your mobile/cell (Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion. #3gsm):

maxroam_sms

On Twitter (Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion. #3gsm):

maxroam_twitter2

On your blog (item name in the post title. Tags must include “review” “rating=N” and “3GSM”):

maxroam_wordpress2

On Jaiku (Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion. %3gsm):

maxroam_jaiku2

On Pownce (Review Rating1-5 ItemName: Opinion. #3gsm):

maxroam_pownce2

Just make sure to get that 3GSM tag into the review. All of the reviews can then be found over at the LouderVoice 3GSM Tag Page.

Let us know if you have any problems or questions at all.

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

Third Competition Winner

February 4, 2008 – 1:10 pm

The third week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.

Review of 3.10 to Yuma

Laurence Veale from Dublin in Ireland wins with his sharp Twitter review of the western “3.10 to Yuma”. As with all the winners, it looks like Lar’s Google juice is strong.

There is only one week left in this first phase of our competition, so get reviewing and you could win a tee like this:

Hairy Baby T-Shirt

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

Easy Blog Reviews with Flag Tags

January 29, 2008 – 1:44 am

The approach we have taken with reviews on blogs until now has been built around a standard called hreview. Many bloggers are a fan of this portable format and we continue to support it strongly. But we have received many requests for something more lightweight which still enables people to get their reviews into LouderVoice but takes much less effort.

After trying a variety of approaches we have settled on something we are calling Flag Tags (thanks to Frank Prendergast for coining this). The idea is simple. If you are writing a blog post that is a review, you need to ensure three very basic things:

  • The blogpost must be the name of the thing you are reviewing (optionally prefixed with “Review Of”)
  • One of the tags/labels must be the word “review”
  • Another tag/label must “rating=N” where N is an integer from 1 to 5

Any other tags/labels are at your discretion to assist the categorisation of your review

A review on Blogger (or Wordpress, Typepad, Movable Type etc) might look like this:

Flag Tag Review on Blogger

Once you let us know the RSS feed for you blog, we’ll monitor it for those three things in your posts and pull in the reviews that we see. As always, we link back to your blog on our site so that people can read the full review. That review above would appear like this on LouderVoice:

Flag Tag Review on LouderVoice

In a few days we’ll provide a little “bookmarklet” which will provide a nice easy way to optionally insert star graphics in your post.

So head on over to your “My Settings” page on LouderVoice and add your Blog’s RSS feed to the “Flag Tags Reviews” source type. Of course you can always mix and match between the two types of reviews on your blog.

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

Second Competition Winner

January 28, 2008 – 10:31 am

The second week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.

Gillette Fusion Review

Mark Twomey from Cork in Ireland wins with his hilarious review of the Gillette Fusion Power razor. As with last week’s winner, Mark is vying for top spot on google.ie. Well done Mark. His review of Sweeney Todd is pure genius too!

As before, get your reviews in by any of the methods we support and you win a funky t-shirt with a logo like this:

Red Rover

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

Can you review a wine in 7 words?

January 24, 2008 – 6:39 pm

Julian from Bubble Brothers let us know about the wonderful Wine Blogging Wednesday community and what they get up to.

The idea is simple: Different bloggers propose ideas for themes or topics for each month and one becomes the host for the month. Participating bloggers then buy a wine that is consistent with the theme and blog their tasting notes on or before the Wednesday of the event. All of the opinions are then summarised and linked to on a roundup page.

The theme for Wine Blogging Wednesday 42 is “Just Seven Words”. The wine should be an Italian Red. Yes, you read that right, they want you to review an Italian Red in JUST SEVEN WORDS. The wine name, type, producer, vintage do not have to be included in the seven. Compact descriptive terminology will be the order of the day.

We contacted Andrew from Spittoon who is hosting WBW 42 and he is happy for LouderVoice users to take part. Not only that but, as always with LouderVoice, you can use any of the platforms we support so your review can be on a blog, via SMS, Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce.

The only thing we ask is that whatever approach you use, you tag the review with “wbw42″. This means we can point Andrew to all the reviews as a collection in one place on LouderVoice like this.

So for SMS, Twitter and Pownce:
Review Rating1to5 DetailsOfWine: JUST SEVEN WORDS ALLOWED HERE. #wbw42

sms_wine


For Jaiku:
Review Rating1to5 DetailsOfWine: JUST SEVEN WORDS ALLOWED HERE. %wbw42

Review 2 Due Lira Chuck 2006: Nasty, turpentine aroma with a diesel aftertaste. %wbw42

For Bloggers:
Just a usual LouderVoice review post with one of the tags/labels set to wbw42

They want all of the reviews to be posted on February 13th. We’ll give you a reminder ahead of time but you can “practice” in the meantime, just don’t tag with wbw42 (but maybe use #wine). Let us know what you think.

I may try it tonight :-)

p.s. Bloggers - we have a new ultra-lightweight way of getting your reviews indexed by us. No writing forms, no plugins, just a standard blogpost with a few tags. The next post here will tell you all the details. It should be perfect for this 7 word challenge.

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By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Reviewing | Comments (8)

First Competition Winner

January 20, 2008 – 1:20 pm

The first week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.

Tommy Tiernan on LouderVoice

John Goodman from Wicklow in Ireland wins with his SMS mini-review of comedian Tommy Tiernan’s “OK Baby”. This was the most read review on the site over the past week. Not only that, but his review tops Google and beats the official site in the search rankings!

Tommy Tiernan on Google

So get your reviews in by any of the methods we support and not only might you win a funky t-shirt with a logo like this:

Hairy Baby T-Shirt

But you might top Google too.

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By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Competition | Comments (0)
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