We’re doing a ton of changes over the next few days in preparation for the Beta2 launch. You’ll see all of the current sites appear and disappear at random. Please be patient with us. The main tasks are to move from a shared host to a VPS and to start using www for everything instead of beta. I’m sure you’re gonna like the changes. Not only that, but those of you who have been wondering what ever happened to your beta invite only have a few more days waiting left to do.
Andy Sack recently wrote a superb blog post (and follow-up) on what Yelp did better than Judy’s Book. I not only admire his honesty and openness but also the clarity of his analysis. Yelp’s focus on a younger demographic and restaurant reviews proved far more fruitful than the wider net and older target audience of Judy’s Book. He also points out that they out-marketed them. Both Judy’s Book and Yelp are competitors of ours in theory as we are all about reviews (I know this is changing in Judy’s Book) .
John Breslin has done two fine posts on structure in blogs over at the IIA Blog. The first is basically about Structured Blogging (SB) and the second about semantic blogging. As many people know, the SB plug-ins for WordPress and MT were released to a mainly positive response way back in Dec 2005. I made much use of them in the early months and was a big fan from an end-user perspective.
E-consultancy has an article about the Times Online story on a new EU directive which may result in criminal prosecution for those who post false reviews about themselves, their products or services using false identities. False reviews are a problem for any review site and are impossible to prevent. However the effect of it can be minimised through the feedback loops of user ratings of reviews. You will naturally gravitate towards those reviews which other users hold in high regard and since that reviewer reputation is an ever changing thing, gaming will always be balanced by well-intentioned users.
Ok ok, so this is niche, very niche, possibly “HyperLocal” in Web2 lingo. I just got a mail from Aonghus saying that we got a mention in the Irish language daily newspaper Lá. It’s actually uber-podcaster Conn Ó MuÃÂneacháin‘s article about BarCamp Ireland South East which we attended a few weeks back. There is a only a PDF version right now which will disappear with tomorrow’s edition. When Conn posts a copy on his blog, I’ll put up a link to it so you can stretch the old language muscles.
we’re sorry we haven’t been handing out very many over the past few weeks. We’ll be doing a major revamp of the beta site around Feb 16th and then we’ll crank up the invites again and try to get everyone in. There are a sufficient number of annoyances and bugs in the current release that most of you will be happier to wait. Not only will the site be a lot slicker in two weeks time, it’s going to look fabulous (darling).
I can’t emphasise enough how important the Web2Ireland event in DCU last year was to the creation of LouderVoice. We simply wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t for some of the deep insights that were offered by a panel of world-class speakers. In particular, the talk given by Judy Gibbons was the trigger which caused me to say “yes I now know I can go for this”. So the guys n gals are starting to plan the 2007 event and need to gauge interest.
Paul, Ken and a few others including myself have agreed to a bit of a challenge in the run up to the Irish Blog Awards. Basically whoever gets the largest percentage increase in RSS subscribers via Feedburner between now and then will do well on the drinks front on awards night. So if you are one of those readers who just pops over here regularly via your browser, why not consider adding this blog to your RSS reader?
Jason and Mike have announced the TechCrunch20 conference and it has a wonderful twist – 20 startups get to present and it costs them nothing to do so, unlike many others. It’s being held on the West Coast in the Autumn Fall. Whether we get a slot or not I think this is shaping up to be something very special. Well done to the two guys for this beautifully disruptive move.
Thanks to Damien for quoting me in The Tribune yesterday. I thought it was an excellent article both on BarCamp and on raising funds. I’d like to explain my quote a little more here. Basically it concerned the €175m the Irish government have given to a set of VCs here. The VCs have to raise matching funds and then start backing businesses here. Many of us have a problem with this idea and my quote was in that context.
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