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.

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.

• That’s Ireland – Fianna Fail’s Fifty Ways to Laugh at Voters
• Fustar – To Whom it Concerns… It’s The Manky Toy Show (Live)!
• Fatmammycat.com – Fox hunting, horses and a girl’s awakening
• Avoiding Life – There seems to be a bit of interest…
• The Provisional Licence Joke
• The Sigla Blog – A milestone
• nialler9 – The Go! Team, Cadence Weapon and the marketing sharks
• Twenty Major – Dickheads of the year
• Present Tense – David McSavage: never again
• Kav’s Blog – Top 5 Scary Moments – #1
• Flirty Something: Let down your fair hair
• Music Road – Irish music, Irish landscape
• Cheebah – A complex webb
• FakeEmpire: Why Katy will change everything. And nothing.
• Balrog – Sinn Fein, what went wrong
• El Blogador – Truth and justice for Paul Quinn
• The Chancer – Here comes the hammer
• YourfriendIntheNorth – Some thoughts on Fianna Fail’s recent discovery of the north
• Swearing Lady – Muppet shooting season

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

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”.

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

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):

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.

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 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 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!

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.