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.

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.

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.

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!

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:

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!

We’ve been terribly quiet on the LV Blog for which we must apologise. We’ve spent the past few weeks frantically getting ready for the next upgrade of the site.

Keep your eyes peeled over the next seven days for lots of new goodies. The plan is to release the features in iterative fashion over the space of a couple of weeks to give each one the attention it deserves. We’ll be adding lots more help too to guide you through each part of the site.

Damien Mulley has just launched a new site called Profile Ireland with a simple laudable aim – to profile tech startups in Ireland. Each post consists of some useful information about a company plus some Q&A. I love the format and it will be extremely useful for anyone looking for a one-stop-shop for information on all of those companies.

He profiled LouderVoice here.

We are incredibly excited that an opportunity to attend TechCrunch40 in San Francisco next week has appeared. It is all due to the wonderful Pat Phelan of [We are incredibly excited that an opportunity to attend TechCrunch40 in San Francisco next week has appeared. It is all due to the wonderful Pat Phelan of]2 who offered a free ticket to a well deserving start-up. LouderVoice is that start-up and I’ll be there from Sunday until Wednesday afternoon.