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.

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.

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

LouderVoice sponsoring The Irish Blog Awards

January 15, 2008 – 10:10 am

Irish Blog Awards 2008 We’re really pleased to announce that we are sponsoring the Best Blog Post award at the 2008 Irish Blog Awards on March 1st in Dublin. Given that so much of LouderVoice is about bloggers and great review blogposts, it only seemed appropriate.

A big thank you to Damien Mulley for once again organising the awards. The past year has seen the Irish blogosphere becoming more and more visible to a mainstream audience. Let’s hope we see even more of that in 2008.

Nominations for the Awards close at 9pm this Friday so get voting and get blogging. There’s nothing stopping a post written in the next four days from winning any of the awards!

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Competition | Comments (2)

Tag your mini-reviews

January 15, 2008 – 9:44 am

This is a little bit of a niche feature but several users have asked for it so we added tagging to mini-reviews on LouderVoice. The idea here is that normally if you send a review by SMS or Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce then it doesn’t have any user defined category like “wine” or “movie”. However, with “hashtags”, if you add these tags/labels onto your review then we’ll pick them up.

It is very easy to do, just prefix any words you want to use as tags/labels with # in your SMS or on Twitter/Pownce. For technical reasons you have to use a % on Jaiku.

So for example an SMS with:

Review 5 Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc 2006: My favourite wine on the planet. Clean, crisp gooseberry flavours. For Chardonnay haters. #wine #New+Zealand

will put that review into the user categories of “wine” and “New Zealand”

A few words of warning. Don’t go crazy with the tags as we currently don’t strip them out and too many will make the reviews unreadable. Also, we recommend putting them at the end of the review rather than in the middle of sentences.

This is an experimental feature and based on your feedback we may make it less flexible in the future so that the “#” symbols are removed from the reviews as they come in.

Let us know what you think.

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Features, LouderMinis | Comments (0)

Win Prizes for your Reviews

January 12, 2008 – 12:59 pm

We are thrilled to announce our first competition on LouderVoice. For the next few weeks Hairy Baby will give one of their fantastic standard t-shirts to the most popular review of each week.

If you haven’t seen these t-shirts then you are really missing out. They are the funniest, wittiest ones you are likely to find and are made from the highest quality materials too.

Hairy Baby T-Shirts

Entering the competition is simple. Submit a review using any of the methods we support (SMS, Blog, Microblog) and each week we’ll look at all those submitted and the most popular one wins.

What to review? What ever interests you! Movies, restaurants, food, Christmas gifts, everything, both good and bad.

Read all the details here and get reviewing and voting!

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Competition | Comments (1)

We now support Pownce too

December 21, 2007 – 1:24 am

pownce_logo

We just enabled support for Pownce that is identical to our Twitter and Jaiku support. Just make sure your reviews are sent to the public on Pownce and use http://www.pownce.com/feeds/public/your_user_name as the RSS feed when adding it to your sources on LouderVoice.

This on Pownce:

pownce_review

Becomes this on LouderVoice:

nokia_maps

As always, let us know here if you have any feedback or problems.

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

Add your Twitter/Jaiku accounts to LouderVoice

December 19, 2007 – 12:53 pm

After a long gestation peroid we now have proper Twitter and Jaiku support in LouderVoice. Each LouderMini review you do on those sites will be associated to your account here along with any SMS reviews or blog reviews that you do.

We have changed the approach from the previous @review on Twitter and #reviews on Jaiku. It is now basically identical to SMS. To enable it, go to your “My Settings” page on LouderVoice and enter your Twitter and/or Jaiku details as a source.

Twitter:

twitter_add_source

Jaiku:

jaiku_add_source

Complete:

sources_added

The main thing to be careful about is to enter the ATOM/RSS feed of your account not of your friends timeline. In Twitter you’ll find the URL of that feed at http://twitter.com/your_user_name and in Jaiku the URL is always http://your_user_name.jaiku.com/feed/atom

Once you’ve added the account(s), you review using a normal Tweet or Viesti in an identical format to SMS:

Review RatingFrom1-5 ItemName: Opinion

So on Jaiku this would look like:

jaiku_example

Resulting in this on LouderVoice shortly afterwards:

jaiku_on_lv

Let us know if you have any problems and anything else you’d like to see in these LouderMinis.

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

Mini-Review Tweak

December 3, 2007 – 7:27 pm

After getting a lot of user feedback we’ve decided to change the format used in mini-reviews slightly. Whereas before you used fullstop+space to separate the reviewed item from the opinion, we now encourage you to use a colon. This should reduce the number of invalid reviews where the space was left out. Many people also felt that the colon was more logical.

Note that we will continue to support the old format too. Of course the new format means that the review item cannot contain a colon so don’t include http:// if you are reviewing a URL!

Here are screen-shots from reviews on Text Message, Twitter and Jaiku showing the new format in action.

On Text Message you use:
Review RatingFrom1-5 ItemName: Opinion

SMS New Format

On Jaiku you use:
#reviews RatingFrom1-5 ItemName: Opinion

Jaiku New Format

On Twitter you use:
@review RatingFrom1-5 ItemName: Opinion

Twitter New Format

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

Text Us Your Loves and Your Loathings

November 20, 2007 – 4:48 pm

We’re really excited by this latest feature. You can now SMS your reviews directly to LouderVoice. So if you walk out of a terrible movie or wonderful restaurant or just want to get your opinion on any product or service off your chest, then now you can. Those reviews will appear within seconds on the LouderVoice site.

The format is simplicity itself:

Review YourRatingFrom_1_to_5 ItemName: Opinion

It should look like this on your phone:

SMS New Format

Then a few moments later, it will appear on LouderVoice.

We have two numbers you can use: +353-87-9409325 and due to strong demand +44-778-6205133

Each SMS costs your standard network rate if you are texting your local country number.

And if you are feeling strongly opinionated, we do accept multi-message SMSes up to slightly more than 400 characters.

Just add your mobile number to your LouderVoice account, try it out and let us know what you think.

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

LouderVoice in Le Web 3 Start-up Competition!

November 9, 2007 – 6:16 pm

We are absolutely delighted to announce that LouderVoice made it to the final 30 of the Le Web 3 Start-Up competition in Paris in December. We are the only Irish company to make it through and our 10 minutes of fame happens at 2.30pm on December 11th.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed several recent changes to the site. We released them quietly but will be telling you all about them in the coming days. The plans for December are even more exciting again!

By Conor O'Neill | Posted in Conferences | Comments (14)
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