The third week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
The second week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.
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:
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
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.
The first week of the competition is over and we can now announce the winner of a Hairy Baby t-shirt.
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!
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:
But you might top Google too.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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:
Becomes this on LouderVoice:
As always, let us know here if you have any feedback or problems.
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:
Jaiku:
Complete:
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:
Resulting in this on LouderVoice shortly afterwards:
Let us know if you have any problems and anything else you’d like to see in these LouderMinis.
