Yawn. This time it’s AT&T on their Yellow Pages site. It’ll be interesting to see if it does affect Yelp and similar sites. I’m not sure it will.

Will Bob and Marge from Akron Ohio really look up the Yellow Pages and think “ya know what hun, now that I’ve found the telephone number of a plumber I must come back later and write a review of how he unblocked our loo”.

Get over to the Irish Blog Awards now and give your votes to a lot of great Irish Bloggers. Nominations close at 65pm Friday.

I’m attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London next week. I arrive Monday night and leave on Thursday morning. They really have a great line up of speakers and I’m looking forward to it immensely. I’ve also signed up for the Geek Dinner with Chris Messina and Tara Hunt on the Wednesday night.

I hope to run into lots of you there. I should be on my super Roam4Free SIM card, in which case I’ll be at +372-531-66646. If not, it’s the usual +353-87-9790297 and conor@argolon.com.

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. We’ll be adding blocks of users each day once we launch. The target is Monday for re-launch but I know that’s being very aggressive so it may be a few days later. I may even launch the new site whilst sitting at a talk in FoWA!

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) . Therefore I have studied both sites (and many others obviously) and I find Andy’s insights very useful.

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. Unfortunately, due to lack of further funding they were not able to keep up with WordPress developments.

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 Muíneacháin‘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). We think we’ve found all of the major bugs and most of the minor ones at this stage. The main outcome from the first round of testing was what we expected; people hate having to click on too many links to get the information they need and people hate forms! The main improvements in the user experience in the next revision will be in those areas.

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. Head on over and vote in the poll.