As of November 2024, LouderVoice and Argolon Solutions Ltd have ceased operations. We would like to thank our many loyal customers for their support over the years. We are proud of the service we provided, the many reviews we helped generate and the businesses we helped along the way.

The LouderVoice API ran continuously with over 6 nines of reliability from 2008 until 2024.

Please feel free to look back over our blog posts and news, beginning in October 2006.

We have updated our privacy policy to include GDPR provisions. This includes information on how to request that your personal information be deleted from our systems.

In addition, anyone submitting reviews using our solution on our clients’ sites must now actively provide their consent that their name and email address can be shared with LouderVoice.

Sometimes it’s the simple features which provide the most value and that’s definitely the case with two of our most recent updates.

Extra Questions

Clients now have the ability to ask up to 5 extra optional questions from reviewers. This is not intended as a replacement for questionnaires or surveys but is more for extra context. For example, some of our hotel clients use it to ask for the room number. But feel free to use the feature in whatever way makes sense for your business. We’d love to hear what you come up with!

The first thing I do when I land on a site I haven’t used before is to check their reviews. Good or bad, I want to see that it is a company which values feedback and is actively providing services or products.

We were really excited recently to sign-up Floradoor in Cairo as our first African client. This high-end florist delivers flowers locally for a global customer base and it has been a joy to read their reviews.

We always strongly encourage our clients to request reviews using every channel available to them, particularly if the bulk of their business is not online. This can be done using receipts, invoices, compliment slips, phone calls or, in the case of our latest restaurant client in France, using an iPad!

This is simply a superb idea by l’Auberge des Trois Pucelles near Grenoble and our partners Thierry André FOUCHER and WSI Belledonne Digital Strategies. They have an iPad at the cash-register with their reviews page pre-loaded in the browser. As customers wait to complete payment, staff members ask if they’d like to leave a review. A few moments later that review is live on their site and on their Facebook Page too.

Many of our clients on PHP platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal have long benefited from our SEO Add-On.

All of our Packages provide Google Juice and Star Ratings in Search results to client sites via our review Hub, LouderYou. The advantage of this approach is ease of deployment. Our code can be added in seconds to a web-page and reviews are then live. Those reviews are indexed on our hub within hours.

We are more than a little pleased to announce this.

American + Ireland Social Media Leaders Join Forces

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: San Jose, CA; Austin, TX; and Cork, Ireland: July 3, 2012 – Three Social Media leaders have come together to offer a compelling solution for restaurants and foodservice companies, beginning in the US. FohBoh.com of San Jose, CA, LouderVoice Reviews of Cork, Ireland, and Restaurant Domain of Austin, TX, can now provide a complete online Social solution to the food industry.

We were very interested to see an MSNBC article on how hotels are embracing online customer reviews. It matches our own experience, as our reviewing solutions are proving a major hit with businesses in the hospitality and travel sectors everywhere. We have seen a string of deployments in UK, Ireland, France and the US in recent months.

As part of this growth, we’re delighted to announce that we have have just gone live with the Dalata Group’s 11 Maldron and 14 partner hotels in Ireland.

LouderVoice and WSI have been working together globally since early 2011. We have now joined forces to offer a compelling Social solution for SMEs in the UK.

Online marketing is an ever-moving target and it can be hard for SMEs to feel on top of everything. To solve this, WSI’s offerings and LouderVoice’s Social Reviews are now available as an off-the-shelf solution that is optimised for the UK. Every business can have their online presence live and social-powered with almost no effort.

One of the most common requests we get from partners and customers is to have the same reviews SEO functionality on ASP.NET as they do for PHP and WordPress sites. And we’re delighted to say that this is now available.

All of our Packages provide Google Juice and Star Ratings in Search results to client sites via our review Hub, LouderYou. The advantage of this approach is ease of deployment. Our code can be added in seconds to a web-page and reviews are then live. Those reviews are indexed on our hub within hours.

Nielsen’s latest Global Trust in Advertising report, which surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries, shows that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family, followed closely by 70% trusting online reviews.

Here are the highlight stats. Read the great piece about it over on Social Commerce Today.

We’ve been in the reviews business for quite a few years so we’re not remotely surprised by this data. But our experience over the past 12 months is that small businesses are now realising the importance of reviews and adding customer reviews solutions to their sites and Facebook. This is as true in rural Ireland as it is in Del Mar California.

Vista la grande richiesta da parte dei nostri partners in italia ed in Svizzera, LouderVoice è ora disponibile in italiano.

Come in ogni nostra assistenza in lingua straniera, ciò include sia l’esperienza dell’utente finale che la gestione delle recensioni da parte delle imprese.

Naturalmente anche tutte le nostre integrazioni con i social networks funzionano perfettamente in italiano, fornendo la completa esperienza della recensione sia sul vostro sito che su Facebook.

As the first company to do Social Reviews on Twitter, way back in 2007, we have finally given in to all the (many!) demands for a Facebook-only solution.

All of our Packages have had a powerful Facebook component since 2009 but this Package enables small businesses, who may not even have their own web-site, to show and solicit customer reviews on their Facebook Page.

Many of the businesses who have contacted us had previously used the old built-in Facebook reviews App. Whilst it was pretty awful, it worked, and they miss it! So we love being the company to put a smile back on their faces.

More and more sites are moving to WordPress as their platform. We have long been WP users and all of our sites are built on it.

The LouderVoice reviews system has always supported WordPress sites but we recently decided to make it even easier to deploy on them.

The new LouderVoice Reviews plug-in is now available and included in the price of all of our Packages. With a few quick clicks, you can install the plug-in and configure reviews for one or more pages on any WP site.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed recently for the leading French Business Magazine, Stratégies. It was about doing business in Ireland and some of the positive aspects of setting up here despite the recession.

You’ll need pretty fluent French to read the entire article but there are some good nuggets in there.

Enjoy!

Strategies Ireland LouderVoice

Due to ongoing strong demand both in France and Canada, LouderVoice is now available fully localised to French.

As with Spanish and Russian, this includes both the entire end-user experience and the review management back-end for businesses.

Of course all of our powerful Social integrations work seamlessly in French too and provide the full 360 degree view from reviews on a businesses site to reviews on Facebook and back again.

LouderVoice was one of the first reviewing apps on Android and was the first ever Irish Android App. It made full use of our powerful API and was a great calling card for our capabilities.

We’re now thrilled to tell you that our API is being used by another mobile application. This time it’s the fabulous Riverdance. If you are a fan of the show, as we are, you are going to want this on your phone. It’s available for both iPhone and Android and has everything you need to enjoy Riverdance even more.

Our development team have been hard at work this summer building a ton of new features for LouderVoice. The first fruits of their labour is the full front-end and back-end localisation of the service. We’ve always been internationalised but now our clients and their customers can use every part of LouderVoice in their own native language.

The first two languages that are available right now are Spanish and Russian with French coming soon. If you have a requirement for any other language, just let us know.

There is a great piece over on Econsultancy about negative reviews. Well worth a read. It can be hard for businesses to display negative reviews on their site but in the end, everyone benefits. My take-away quote from the article:

Thinking of reviews as positive or negative is not helpful. It stops us from considering and building on what this information is really about, which is informing and influencing the decisions others will make after reading it.

The Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Live Newsletter interviewed me about the value of capturing customer feedback, both positive and negative. Enjoy!

The power of Twitter to connect people has proven itself yet again. Ann Donnelly of O’Mahony Donnelly E-Business, down the road in Clonakilty, pointed us to an article by TMG Custom Media in Washington DC. A few tweets later and we were having an email exchange with Andrew Hanelly in TMG.

The result is a great Q&A over on TMG about the 5 Myths of Customer Reviews. We think it deals with the number one issue that still stops people from adding reviews to their site – fear.

My talk on customer reviews at the IIA’s “8 More Ways to Sell Even More Stuff” event seemed to go down very well.

Judge for yourself. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.

The IIA is running a follow-up to their very successful retail event late last year. Called “8 More Ways to Sell Even More Stuff“, it’s all about selling online and multi-channel.

The focus this time is “Content and Analysis” and therefore it’s no surprise that LouderVoice will be there talking about Social Commerce and how you can power that with Social-enabled Customer Reviews. No serious online business can ignore what their customers are saying about them and we’ll show just how easy it is to benefit from those conversations.

To describe Riverdance as a global entertainment phenomenon is to undersell it. Over the past sixteen years, millions of people have seen the show in places ranging from Sligo to Shanghai.

The Riverdance team decided to go with a totally new site towards the end of 2010 and the result is an absolute triumph. When they contacted us about powering the reviews for them, we couldn’t have been more excited. We quickly deployed our Social Commerce Reviews solution on the site and you can now review both the overall experience and every individual show. Of course we have Facebook and Twitter baked in so everyone can get the message out about how much they love Riverdance.

It’s that time of the year again! LouderVoice has been at Le Web every year since 2006. Back then, it was just some ideas and a very basic Alpha, this time we are part of the Irish Pavilion.

Enterprise Ireland has put together a unique Demozone at Le Web. 11 hot Irish start-ups including LouderVoice will be there. A single place where we can meet, have a coffee and show you what we do. This is the first time a country has exhibited at Le Web and we are honoured to be part of it.

Lots of very interesting headline stats about e-commerce over on the Econsultancy site. It appears that the prediction of the first online Christmas (50p in the £) by 2015 is well on its way to coming true.

IMRG predicts that £6.4bn will be spent online in December 2010, up from £5.5bn last year. Total online spending for 2010 is predicted to reach £57,8bn, compared with £49.8bn in 2009.

The Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards for European tech companies, will be held on November 19 in London. Entrants will be voted on by the industry and these results will guide a subsequent voting round from The Europas Advisory Board of experts.

LouderVoice is listed in the “Best Business or Enterprise Startup 2010” Category. If you think we deserve the award, why not head over to the site and cast your vote. There are lots of great companies in the other categories too!

Who doesn’t love being nominated for an award, particularly when it’s in the innovation category? We’re in the final 5 of the Irish Web Awards Most Innovative Website and we’re smugger than the smuggest company in Smugtown.

The awards are on this Saturday in the Mansion House. Go now to the list of finalists in all categories and don’t just read the list, click through on all the ones you don’t know.

Last year’s Hotel Website Marketing Conference was a superb event. I spoke on the value of customer reviews but I learned 10x that from the other speakers on all of the online marketing (and other) challenges/opportunities being faced by hotels.

Ciarán and the team have outdone themselves this year with the speaker line-up. As we just couldn’t miss it, we’ve decided to exhibit there too. Keep an eye out for the LouderVoice stand and pop over for a chat. We can tell you how these businesses and others in the the hospitality industry are benefiting from customer reviews and how your hotel could too.

We have just added a new Facebook capability for all of our customers. They can now show all their latest reviews in a dedicated “Our Reviews” tab on their Facebook Page. Whilst our Facebook Connect implementation has always given reviewers the ability to post their reviews to their personal wall, this new feature enables our clients to showcase their reviews from all their products and services in one place.

Now a simple review written on a client’s site or submitted by SMS can appear on their Facebook Page within minutes, building confidence and guiding others who want to know more about that business. Fundamentally it’s about selling by word of mouth.

There is a fantastic block of stats about consumer reviews over on Search Engine People. If you are wondering why this is such a strong growth area, wonder no longer!

A few of their gems:

1. 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust unknown users, 27% trust experts, 14% trust advertising, 8% trust celebrities (Econsultancy, July 2009, Erik Qualman, Socialnomics)
2. 70% consult reviews or ratings before purchasing (BusinessWeek, Oct. 2008)
3. 7 in 10 who read reviews share them with friends, family & colleagues thus amplifying their impact (Deloitte & Touche, Sept. 2007)
4. 45% say they are influenced a fair amount or a great deal by reviews on social sites from people they follow (46% say reviews in newspaper or magazine influence them.) (Harris Poll, April 2010)

Thanks to Richard Hearne, SEO god from Red Cardinal for the link.

Business books will be written about the amazing story of the new Fastnet Line Ferry to Ireland. This much needed service operating from Swansea to Cork is proving to be a major success for the region. So you can imagine our excitement at LouderVoice becoming part of this story by powering the customer reviews on their site.

Whilst reviews are important for any business, their importance to new businesses cannot be under-estimated. The response from travellers has been phenomenal since reviews were turned on last week. The unique direct feedback has enabled Fastnet Line to immediately discover what is working very well and what can potentially be changed or improved.

Head on over to Krishna De’s site to learn how you can get the LouderVoice Standard Package (normally €49+VAT per month) for free for a whole year!

Having customer reviews on your site has moved from nice-to-have or cutting-edge to something you simply must have to compete online.

We are often asked what types of business are most suited to reviews. Our answer is “all of them”! LouderVoice recently went live with a UK site called Parcel2Ship which offers a brilliantly simple but powerful service. They have aggregated all the parcel and document delivery services so that you just enter a destination and package size and they show you all the options and prices available.

If only we had known about the service when we were going to Internet World in London in May! We bounced from site to site to site trying to find the best price/delivery combination. Parcel2Ship would have saved us hours of effort and stress.

The hospitality industry is a big focus for LouderVoice at the moment. Hotels have long led the way in their use of technology to grow sales and build stronger relationships with their customers.

West Cork Hotel is based in Skibbereen in Co Cork and has been doing an amazing job with revamping every aspect of the business and then getting that message out to the world through Facebook and Twitter.

If you picked up one of our special Internet World show-offer flyers last week in Earl’s Court, you can easily sign-up with us now.

Just fill out this form here and quote the discount code and we’ll get you setup at the reduced rate.

Want to know what LouderVoice can do for your business? Got 2 minutes? Watch this speedy screencast by Karl Llewellyn, our Head of Sales, to get all the important facts.

LouderVoice 1,2,3 from Conor O’Neill on Vimeo.

The Internet World show is on in Earl’s Court, London, from April 27th to 29th and LouderVoice will be there in force.

As sole sponsors of  the Wireless Lounge, you’ll need to talk to us if you want a decent free wifi connection! We’re on Stand E1060.

Despite the volcano, a massive crowd is expected for the show, as in previous years. Whether you are interested in e-commerce, digital marketing, social media, content management or any aspect of operating online, this is the UK show to attend.

This is the kind of news we love to get on a sunny Monday morning in West Cork. We have been shortlisted in the Innovation Category of the Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards. If you think we deserve the award then why not head over and vote? Don’t forget all the other categories too, lots of fantastic companies and people in there.

Those of you who have followed LouderVoice over the past few years have probably noticed that things have changed a lot in the last few months. All of those changes have been for the better and much of it is due to Karl Llewellyn, our new Head of Sales.

Karl is responsible for driving our new partner strategy and recruiting web professionals as partners so they can offer LouderVoice to their customers. Loudervoice already has customers internationally, but partners are a key part of our formal launch into the UK this year.

We have just launched a new partner program paying out substantial commission and bonus payments to web professionals, developers and marketers that refer customers.

LouderVoice is Ireland’s largest and longest standing provider of Review & Rate (R&R) solutions to e-businesses. These solutions give customers the ability to post reviews of a products or services on the website they bought from. R&R tools are seen by market analysts as one of the most important tools for any website serious about online business*.

We really are jumping up and down with excitement to finally announce that LouderVoice’s first US client went live just before Le Web recently. Klipsch USA now has the LouderVoice customer review system across the entire klipsch.com web-site.

For those in Europe not familiar with this legendary US brand, it had defined high-end audio since 1946 and is adored by audiophiles everywhere.

Conor will be at Le Web in Paris from tomorrow afternoon until Friday morning. If you’d like to meet up to discuss any aspect of the LouderVoice business then feel free to contact him via any of the following methods:

• Mobile: +353-87-9790297
• Twitter: @conoro
• e-mail: conor AT loudervoice DOT com

Hope to see you there, it’s building up to be the best Le Web ever!

Wow.

Jolie O’Dell just did the Top Ten International Web Products of 2009 on the always brilliant ReadWriteWeb.

We didn’t make the Top Ten yet but that’s OK, we’ll be there in 2010 🙂

What we did make was the Honourable Mentions list!

The only Irish web company to do so.

The Golden Spiders award was national recognition for what we’ve been doing this year and now this is global.

To be in the same story as Spotify, Moshi Monsters, Tweetmeme and all the others is a real honour.

Trendwatching.com has released its list of 10 Crucial Consumer Trends of 2010.

At Number 3 is Real-Time Reviews

Sometimes we’re just a tiny bit ahead of the trends here in LouderVoice HQ:

That’s why @review is LouderVoice!

We’ve been working with the Luckebox team for the past few months and they have impressed the socks off us with their plans. As of today, they have now fully launched.

What do they do? Gift boxes, lots of them, all full of awesomeness. Not rubbish cheese or stale puddings but stuff you actually want!

Each box contains a particular mix of things at a massive discount over retail prices. They include:

Yesterday I attended the excellent Hotel Website Marketing event in Dublin organised by Proactiv Marketing. It was a real highlight of 2009 for me with fantastic speaker after fantastic speaker. I walked away with a ton of to-dos for LouderVoice.

I spoke on the benefit of on-site customer reviews for hotels. The core message was that you can grow on-site sales, reduce online ad spend and improve your customer service by adding reviews to your site.

We were terribly disappointed last Thursday that massive flooding in West Cork prevented us from attending the 2009 Golden Spiders Awards. The awards are the most high profile in Ireland and a win can have serious business benefits locally.

So imagine our shock to hear that we won the e-business category! We were up against some incredibly impressive competition. Getting this recognition from our industry peers on the judging panel really is satisfying.

The LouderVoice customer reviews system for business has moved into high-gear in 2009. Clients are deploying our EasyReview widget on their e-commerce sites every week. Our first US customer will go live this month along with many more Irish sites. Our second UK site will go live early in the new year.

The most recent research by Internet Retailer tells you everything you need to know about how important reviews are to businesses.

This is the press release that went out to traditional media yesterday:

Guest reviews drive up sales and promote hotel online.

Castlemartyr Resort, the most luxurious hotel in Ireland, now has the market’s most advanced customer reviews solution on its web-site through an alliance with fellow Munster companies LouderVoice and Hotel Consult.

This Friday 13th and Saturday 14th sees the Good Wine Show take place in Cork.

LouderVoice has collaborated with hosts Bubble Brothers, Curious Wines and Karwig Wines to enable everyone attending the show the chance to review everything they drink and eat. It couldn’t be simpler. Customers can text or twitter their opinions on the 100+ wines and food available.

Yes you can! Renowned SEO expert Richard Hearne of Red Cardinal did exactly that this afternoon with the LouderVoice EasyReview system.

Think you can beat him?

The Golden Spider awards’ shortlists have been announced. We’re delighted to be shortlisted in the “Best e-business Website ” and “Best Professional Services Website” categories this year.

We’ve been very busy here and so are only getting around to announcing this now. You may have noticed we’ve had a makeover recently. We love our new look.

Huge thanks and all credit due to the wonderful design guru Sabrina Dent and also to David Kelly of Ambient Age for the backend coding.

Have a look at reasons why you should have reviews on your website, the various ways of getting reviews on your website and then give it a go. It couldn’t be easier to get reviews on your site now and increase sales.

We’re delighted to announce that LouderVoice has been shortlisted in the Irish Software Association Awards 2009 in the category for Technical Innovation. Great news and recognition resulting from our LouderVoice Review Widget, API reviews and Google Android Application.

Today marks the launch of technology news and reviews site teic.ie, which has to be one of the best site names we’ve seen! It’s written by Adam Maguire who is one of the finest technology and business journalists in the country. Adam’s reviews are in-depth and extremely knowledgeable. The use of a blog format means he should quickly see a community forming around the site and there is no reason we won’t have a European Gizmodo or Engadget on our hands.

The brilliant LittleQuiz site runs a different quiz each week with some fantastic prizes which could be yours by answering three simple questions. This week those questions are about LouderVoice. Head on over and you could be in with a chance to win a mobile phone and call credit.

If you are a business looking for simple effective promotional opportunities, I can highly recommend talking to Joe Scanlon who runs the site.

We’ve spent the past few months in LouderVoice creating Version 2 of our review widget and have been quietly rolling it out on sites since early August. In our humble opinion, it is the best widget-based reviews solution on the market globally. Not only can it be implemented on most sites in under 10 minutes, it is also fully Facebook and Twitter enabled and can be easily styled to blend seamlessly into your site

If you have any interest in Cloud Computing then you should be attending next week’s Cloud Computing Summit in Croke Park in Dublin.

The line-up of speakers is fantastic and the topics very relevant to businesses of any size. LouderVoice CEO, Conor, will be on a user panel speaking about our experiences of moving all the LouderVoice services to Amazon AWS. That includes S3, EC2, EBS, EIP, Cloudfront and only excludes ELB since it hasn’t launched in Europe yet.

It’s always a pleasure to meet like-minded people who understand the power of online reviews for businesses. Pat O’Neill of HotelConsult is one of those people and we’re thrilled to be working with him in the hotel space.

In these difficult times for hotels, any advantage that they can gain is worthwhile. On-site reviews are a proven way of growing sales and on-site sales for hotels means they improve their margin.

We’ve always been impressed with the Citylocal franchise which was built by Nazir Daud in the UK. Paul Brugger launched the Cork site last year and it has been growing at an amazing rate. CityLocal Cork is a Business Directory and community website that provides local information on Businesses, News, Events, Free Ads, Property and Cinema listings.

Visitors to Citylocal often leave reviews of the businesses they find there. We are now aggregating those reviews into our system, adding to the already powerful SEO mojo of Citylocal. By doing this, Citylocal’s customers will now see their reviews appearing on loudervoice.com, on Google Android mobile phones and shared by users to Facebook and a multitude of other social networking sites. In every case, the reviews point back to their Citylocal presence.

Then why not become a fan of LouderVoice over on Facebook. We’re thinking of calling it LouderFace 🙂

You’ll get all our latest updates (but not too many!) and you can tell us what you think of each new release.

Lots of categories, so head on over and nominate your favourite sites. Voting closes this Friday.

Make your nominations in the following categories:

• High Potential Start-Up award – recognises a leading company in early stage business planning and execution;
• High Growth Company award – recognises a leading established company driving forward in international markets;
• Sustained Excellence award – recognises an established company with a record of consistent growth and profitability
• R&D Project award recognises a leading innovative technology research project within industry or third level college;
• IT Department award recognises an IT department that can clearly demonstrate business benefit from IT project implementations;
• Green Technology award recognises a company that has implemented or developed technology solutions to achieve reductions in energy use
• Excellence in Education award – recognises the efforts of an individual, group or school to engage with technology for education purposes.

We’ve seen it growing year by year but the latest Nielsen research really drives it home. There is a great piece about it over on Computerworld.

Consumer reviews and personal recommendations are as important as trusted brand reviews for Internet consumers.

The Nielsen survey, the largest of its kind, shows that 90 percent of Internet consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trust consumer opinions posted online.

We had a fantastic time at the second Irish Facebook Garage in Dublin on Thursday. A packed room of approx 150 people with a wide range of backgrounds heard 5 speakers cover a variety of topics over the space of 2.5 hours.

There will be full coverage including video and all the PPTs available over on Web2Ireland at some point next week. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of Conor’s live demo of the LouderVoice reviews widget + Facebook Connect in action. This widget will be formally launched in the next week or so.

We’re absolutely delighted to be nominated in the inaugural Europa Awards in the category of Best Web Application or Service (EMEA). The Europas are the Techcrunch Europe technology innovation awards for European tech companies and the ceremony will be held on July 9 in London. Public voting is now open in all categories.

Major congratulations also go to Joe Drumgoole of Putplace who is nominated in the Best Startup Founder(s) (EMEA) category (Vote here) and Decisions for Heroes which is nominated in the Best Social Innovation (which benefits society, EMEA) category. (Vote here).

Krishna De of Biz Growth Live did an extended interview with CEO Conor all about ratings and reviews. If you want to hear a lot of valuable information about why reviews make sense for your business, have a listen.

Thanks Krishna!

LouderVoice was the first reviews company to realise the importance of Twitter. That’s why we’re the people behind @review which we launched in June 2007.

Since then we’ve played and tweaked mini-reviews based on user feedback.

Following more research we realised that many people were doing mini-reviews using the simple method of just adding #review on to the end of the tweet. This was also the preferred approach in our recent poll.

Yesterday evening we uploaded the first public beta of our Google Android mobile application to the Android Market.

This is the first Irish Android application and one of the very first reviewing applications on the platform.

You’ll have to patiently wait for the launches of the HTC Magic and Samsung I7500 before  most Irish people can try it out. Anyone living in countries where Android is already live can install it now.

We’re pleased as punch to announce that our brand new customer reviews widget has just gone live on the Bubble Brothers wine site. Julian, their Wine 2.0 guru, has always been at the forefront of social media adoption and the addition of our widget complements all of their other online activities beautifully.

The key thing about the widget is the ease of implementation. One line of code was added to the Bubble Brothers product page template (they use Ecommerce Templates for their site), a few minor logo tweaks later and they were up and running. No development on their side and just some quick colour/size adjustments by us. That’s all it takes to review-enable an entire site!

It’s always a delight to work with like-minded companies so we were doubly pleased when Puddleducks.ie contacted us recently about using the LouderVoice customer reviews system on their site.

Puddleducks is a rapidly growing online retailer of outdoor clothing for both children’s and adults. In fact,  we first encountered them as personal customers of their fantastic products. Their range includes Swedish designed dungarees, jackets and trousers for children, as well as waterproof clothing and work wear for adults.

The LouderVoice customer reviews service is getting a lot of attention from businesses who are looking for ways to retain customers and grow sales in these difficult times.

So the latest research from Avail Intellingence comes as no surprise to us. InternetRetailing reports that the research shows over a third (36%) of respondents rated peer opinions such as recommendations, reviews and customer generated wish lists as the most useful aspect of an Internet-shopping site.

How about adding $2.7B to you bottom line?

Via Econsultancy:

… calculates that, since displaying the most helpful reviews has increased sales in the media products category by 20%, overall this feature was worth $2.7bn to Amazon

Contact business@loudervoice.com if you’d like to hear how reviews can help your business!

Nice piece by John Collins in The Irish Times Innovation magazine today about the iPhone App Store and Android. Quotes from Conor, Pat Phelan and Steve Troughton-Smith.

“An awful lot of developers had no route to market before the App Store came along,” says Conor O’Neill, software industry veteran and managing director of online review site LouderVoice. He cites the case of Steven Troughton-Smith, a 20-year-old Irish student who has sold thousands of copies of his iPhone applications. In the first six days it was available, Speed, an application that shows how fast you’re travelling, was downloaded 36,000 times. The application was free at that time, but now sells for €0.79.

We have two bits of news about our LouderVoice plug-in. The first is that it is now WordPress 2.7 compatible and the second is that we have moved the hosting over to WordPress.org. This means that from now on, when we update it, you’ll see a notification in your WordPress Admin Panel.

Apart from the 2.7 compatibility change, the only other major feature is that you can opt to have all the contextual information about the review, including the stars, at the end of the text. Full instructions in the readme.

Scott Adams nails it beautifully as always.

As you probably know, LouderVoice was the first company to identify Twitter as an important source of reviews. We launched LouderTweets structured reviews all the way back in June 2007. We are also the people behind the @review user.

Whilst many people have used the structured reviews since then, many others have found the structure difficult to remember or just plain awkward.

We turned on free-form reviews on SMS last year and most people are much happier with that. They simply send an SMS to us beginning with “RE” (or one of our partners’ keywords) and the remainder of the review is in whatever style they like.

We’ve had a fantastic year in LouderVoice and it looks like 2009 is going to be even better with a raft of new releases in the next few months. Looking back over last year we achieved the following:

• In January we launched Flag Tag reviewing which enabled any blogger to have their blog reviews collected by LouderVoice with two simple tags on a post.
• We also added Twitter/SMS/Jaiku hashtag support
• In February we sponsored the Best Blog Post in the Irish Blog Awards
• In March we did our first major revamp with LouderVoice V2 adding on-site reviews and a ton of other features.
• We also launched V2 of our WordPress Plugin. (Updated Plugin for WP 2.7 coming very soon!)
• We spent from April to October busy fixing bugs and building our B2B offering
• In July we started using Get Satisfaction for Customer support. Don’t hesitate to add bug reports or feature requests there.
• In September we launched Simple SMS reviews requiring just a single keyword
• We were also Shortlisted in the Irish Web Awards
• In October we launched LouderVoice for Business to great attention
• We were also shortlisted in the Irish Software Association Awards
• And we kicked off our BES 2008 Offering for Irish Investors
• In November, our first B2B client, Klipsch, went live
• In December we successfully closed a BES investment round which will ensure our continued success through 2009

We should have posted this before Christmas but the final winner in the Three competition was Gabriel Kelly from Carrigaline in Cork for her review of the Philips DCP951/05.

 

   

 

One of the prize phones from Three and Custom-1 headphones from Klipsch are already on their way to her.

Well done to all the winners and thanks again to George Hook for making this all happen.

We’ll be kicking off some new competitions shortly. Keep an eye out here, on Twitter or on the site itself for details.

The third winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is SarahMc from Waterford who wrote a review of a very interesting device called the Scansound Unilateral Stereo Headphone. This sends both stereo channels into one earpiece for people who are deaf in one ear. Fantastic device and really informative review from Sarah!

 

   

 

One of the prize phones from Three and Custom-1 headphones from Klipsch will shortly be on their way to her.

Conor, the LouderVoice CEO, is attending his third Le Web conference in Paris this week. He’d love to meet with other start-ups, tech journalists and the European investment community. He’ll be on +353-87-9790297 from Monday evening to Thursday morning and a French Maxroam number (TBD) from Tuesday morning.

The second winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is Castle Tunes from Dublin who wrote a very detailed review of the Squeezebox Boom.

 

   

 

One of the prize phones from Three and Custom-1 headphones from Klipsch will shortly be on their way to Dublin.

There are another two weeks left in the competition. So get writing gadget reviews on the site or via SMS. The winner will be announced each Monday on the show which you can also listen to on the Newstalk web-site.

The first winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is Snowgirl from Thurles who wrote [The first winner in the Three competition on The Right Hook has been announced on George’s radio show. It is Snowgirl from Thurles who wrote]2 of the Sony Ericsson C905 phone. Our favourite line in the review was: “a camera that can call people”.

 

   

 

  

Three Ireland Reviewing Competition

Three Ireland in conjunction with Newstalk Radio, Klipsch and LouderVoice have just launched a reviewing competition for listeners in Ireland of George Hook on the Right Hook Radio Show.

Each week for the next four weeks, the best reviewer can win a Three Ireland handset plus Klipsch Custom-1 headphones. You can send reviews by SMS or write them directly here on the site

The Prizes

Click on the thumbnails for full information on each prize.

If you like what we are doing on LouderVoice, why not vote for us in the Mashable Open Web Awards? You can do it below.

Don’t forget to vote for all your favourite Irish WebApps, many of which can be found over at Web2Ireland.org.

We are incredibly happy to announce that Klipsch has just launched its UK specific site. Not only are they selling amazing audio equipment but the reviews there are powered by LouderVoice.

When you are investing £1000 in a sub-woofer, you want to be sure you are picking the right one. Reviews by other customers can help you make that decision. The Klipsch guys understand that those reviews are a win-win for everyone.

Some nice mentions of LouderVoice yesterday:

Irish Times article by John Collins

BES article by Caroline Madden

Silicon Republic article by John Kennedy

Web2Ireland article by Fergus Burns

For Irish taxpayers, we have just kicked off our BES 2008 offering which is built around the LouderVoice B2B Services. The Business Expansion Scheme provides a way to invest in approved businesses and receive tax-relief on that investment.

If you are interested in hearing more about this investment opportunity or discussing direct equity investment, please contact Conor O’Neill on conor AT loudervoice DOT com or +353-87-9790297.

In summary:

• B2C www.loudervoice.com launched May 2007
• B2B business.loudervoice.com launched October 2008
• Irish Web Awards 2008 Best New Web Service Nominee
• Irish Software Association New Company Award 2008 Nominee
• Participant in the Genesis Enterprise Programme 2008
• Enterprise Ireland Grant Funding as High Potential Start-Up in 2007
• Existing BES Investment in 2007
• New investor funds to be used to grow and market the service Europe-wide
• Revenue Approved Scheme
• Tax Relief available for 2008
• Defined exit mechanism

What a fantastic couple of weeks in the life of LouderVoice. Yesterday we found out we’ve been shortlisted for New Company of The Year by The Irish Software Association. This is one helluva heavy-duty event and we’re nervous about the interview process already.

There will be lots more announcements and coverage in the next two weeks so watch closely.

Over the past few months we have been trialling our business services with several clients. Some of those are already live, others will go live over the next quarter. We now have a very nice brochure site to go with these services and a very powerful content moderation back-end for our clients.

The LouderVoice for Business site gives the high level overview of our services which are currently in three areas:

• White-label review service based on a secure XML API
• SMS reviews and customer feedback
• Custom review widgets

If we were excited to be on the long-list, we’re utterly gobsmacked to be shortlisted for best new Web Application/Service in the Irish Web Awards. It’s not just that we’re in the shortlist, look at the awesome apps we are in with:

 

• Bookmeetingroom – I only wrote about this great app recently on Web2Ireland
• PollDaddy – I use this ALL the time. One of my fave webapps ever. 
• Twitterfone – Not just dead useful, one of the most beautiful web-site designs of 2008.
• Decisions for Heroes – Read this. That’s them that is. Utter brilliance.

 

This is the inaugural year for the Irish Web Awards and we’re giddier than the giddiest people in Giddytown to be in the long-list for Best New Web Application/Service.

It’s one hell of a set of webapps there and we’re humbled to be in with them.

We kicked off SMS reviewing last year using the same structured message format which we devised for Twitter and Jaiku. Whilst it suits a lot of our users, particularly those who want their reviews to appear instantly, many others felt that the structure was overly complex.

Based on this user feedback, we are now launching Simple SMS Reviews. The idea here is that you send your review to the same number as before (+353-87-9409325 or +44-778-6205133), you begin your SMS with the keyword “Re” and then the remainder of the SMS is your review in whatever style you like.

Conor is on The Right Hook radio show this evening on Newstalk with Joe Drumgoole from PutPlace. He’ll be talking about the LouderVoice service in general and kicking off an SMS reviews push in conjunction with the show. You can listen live on the web here.

As part of this, we are launching our Simple SMS Review service. There’ll be more detail in the next post but the key point is that unlike the existing service, no structure is required on your reviews. We also provide custom keywords for our business clients and partners.

We’ve had lots of feedback that our support mechanisms on LouderVoice were weak. Up until today, you could email info@ or leave a comment here on the blog. We know this isn’t good enough and have decided to make use of Get Satisfaction to provide a better service in this area.

You’ll see the Get Satisfaction logo in the sidebar of every page. If you run into any problems at all with the site or find things you don’t understand, then click on the logo. As time goes by, hopefully you’ll find a solution or answer already there.

The results are in and the winner of the gorgeous Spicendipity BBQ Hamper is Katie Murphy from Cork. Congratulations Katie, the hamper is on its way from Tullamore right now. Her review of TOC matched our own experiences perfectly.

The Taste of Cork Food Festival is coming this weekend in the deep south of Ireland. There will by myriad stands offering food and beverages to sample including lots of famous Munster Artisan producers.

We’re partnering with several of the exhibitors including Ummera and Bubble Brothers to encourage those who attend to review both the event and the individual stands. Reviews can be submitted by any of the usual methods but SMS seems the most appropriate. Keep an eye out for our flyers on the stands.

Profilactic has been doing Lifestreaming longer than most.

It’s a site where you pull in your profiles from all your social sites like Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce/Bebo/MySpace etc so that your aggregated activity online is visible from one place. It currently supports 186 different social sites and we’re thrilled that they have just added LouderVoice.

Once you’ve signed up for an account, you just have to provide your LouderVoice username for them to pull in the titles of your reviews into your Profilactic lifestream.

Many thanks to Loud Reviewer Frank Prendergast for spotting a bug in our WordPress plug-in. This bug prevented users from setting review posts to publish in the future. The bug has now been fixed and the updated plug-in is available here.

You’ve probably noticed how quiet we’ve been on the blog. Not only have we been fixing a lot of small bugs on the site that crept in with the Version2 launch but we’re been working hard on building our API. This will enable other sites to embed our reviewing functionality on their pages. We’ll be going live very shortly with the first partner on this. This XML API is accessible directly, using a PHP library or using a JS library (with more coming soon).  If this is something you’d like to hear more about, please contact conor AT loudervoice DOT com. We’re putting together some information pages on it at the moment too.

We closed the first phase of the reviews competition a few weeks ago but we were so blown away by the review by Alx Cahiz of the stunning Dervish Longboard that we had to give him a prize.

This wasn’t just review of the week, I think it was review of the month! Looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with. It should also be said that TeamGearedUp is one of the best blogs out there about outdoor sports and activities.

We’ve been promising it forever and now we’re finally ready to unveil the all-new LouderVoice WordPress plug-in V2.0. This enables you to write reviews on your blog using an open standard called hReview. Sites like LouderVoice can then index and interpret them more intelligently than raw blog-posts.

The new plug-in is a total re-write based on lots of user feedback and, in particular, some fantastic suggestions and guidance from Robin Blandford.

We quietly launched V2 of our LouderVoice on the night before the Irish Blog Awards and have been tweaking for a few weeks. There is a lot more to come but we thought it’d be good to let you know what has changed now since we have a few more announcements coming in the next few days.

The main aim with V2 was to make the activity on the site much more visible to the users and provide more opportunities to interact with others on the site. The most obvious change (apart from the very sexy re-design by Doepud) in that area is that all of the latest/best reviews are visible on every page you visit. We have also added the ability to follow other reviewers so that all of their activity is visible on your logged-in home page on the site.

Well done to all the winners at the Irish Blog Awards on Saturday. A wonderful night was had by everyone and our only disappointment was that we didn’t get to meet Fatmammycat who won in the LouderVoice-sponsored Best Blog Post category with her incredibly moving post on fox hunting.

The success of the awards every year is down to one man, Damien Mulley. Thanks again for another memorable night.

Here is the full list of winners:

The finalists for the Best Blog Post at the 2008 Awards have been announced. Looking forward to meeting them all on Saturday.

• Swearing Lady – Muppet shooting season
• 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
• FakeEmpire: Why Katy will change everything. And nothing.
• Cheebah – A complex webb
• Twenty Major – Dickheads of the year
• Flirty Something: Let down your fair hair
• Music Road – Irish music, Irish landscape
• Balrog – Sinn Fein, what went wrong

Hope we see some interesting schwag on the night too!

Bernie Goldbach, well known blogger/journalist/lecturer/consultant got some teenagers to recommend chippers in Tipperary by SMS. We now have 7 of the top Chips in Tipp on LouderVoice. What’s your favourite?

We’ve been working round the clock to get the next version of LouderVoice out the door. We are within a hair’s breadth now! What can you expect to see?

• A big redesign with a much busier home page to enable you to explore the site more easily
• Reviews and comments in-site so you no longer need a blog to write full reviews
• Review images
• Instant sign-up
• Instant sign-up via SMS
• Community features enabling you to follow other users and see their activity on the site
• Avatar images
• Review Drafts
• A new voting system
• Major improvements to tag navigation
• Basic support for Google Maps
• A faster search back-end
• And a ton of other under the hood improvements

Keep an eye out, we know you’re going to like it.

We hope you have your bottle of Italian Red ready. The challenge is to write a review of it in just seven words! All the details on how to send your review to LouderVoice are here. Leave a comment if you have any questions.

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.

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.

Web2Ireland.org has arranged a fantastic event in Dublin this coming Thursday. Ten Irish Web start-ups will be presenting their wares to an assembled group of peers, press, Irish Investors, UK Investors, the Future of WebApps conference organisers and other interested parties.

We are thrilled that LouderVoice is one of the ten. If you want to find out more about us, hear about the new features we are launching very soon or would like to discuss investment opportunities (including BES), please head down to Ely HQ on Hanover Quay in Dublin at 6.30pm.

A big thanks to Joseph Scott over at WordPress.com for fixing the posting problem. Our reviewers can now safely start using them as a target for their reviews again.

Just a quick note to all our wordpress.com reviewers. Right now you will get an error if you post reviews from LouderVoice to this site. They broke something over the weekend which interferes with remote publishing of blog posts.

We are not the only ones suffering with this, Flock and BlogDesk are too. The basic problem is that whilst the post actually succeeds, the wordpress.com site returns an invalid response when we ask for the URL of the new post. In Flock’s case it just hangs.

We’ve just found out that one of the most prolific bloggers on LouderVoice, ManicMammy, was referenced by the Wall Street Journal in an article about virtual pets and Webkinz.

The mission of LouderVoice has always been to get the valuable opinions and knowledge of great reviewers heard. ManicMammy is one of a growing breed who actually started blogging so that they could get their reviews online in one place where there reputation resides. She is reporting a serious spike in traffic as a result of the link from the WSJ.

We thought we’d have some fun with Dave Winer‘s TwitterGram idea. You can upload MP3’s to TwitterGram and the service will send a Tweet on Twitter with a link to it so that people can listen to it. Robert Scoble did some reviews using it and we realised that it can work perfectly with LouderVoice via LouderTweets/LouderMinis.

If you want to do an audio review it really is trivial.

• Sign Up on Twitter

If you are a Twitter user and want to send reviews of Oxegen from your phone to us, you do not have to be signed up on LouderVoice. All you have to do is this:

• Add the the oxegen user as a friend on Twitter. You’ll be added back within a few minutes.
• make sure your mobile number is registered with them
• Start sending your reviews by SMS to +447624801423 in the following format:
• @oxegen 5 Queens of the Stone Age. Greatest band on the planet. Live set blew my mind
• So the format is: @oxegen RatingOutOf5 Thing. ReviewText

That’s it!

We’d love it if you would send us all your live mini-reviews of the two day Oxegen music festival.

Here are all the instructions for Jaiku users and for first-time mini-reviewers. Twitter instructions are coming in another post.

To send reviews of Oxegen from your phone to us, you do not have to be signed up on LouderVoice. All you have to do is this:

• Sign Up here on the wonderful Finnish site Jaiku
• Join the #oxegen channel there
• Register your mobile number with them
• Start sending your reviews by SMS to +46 737 494 0501 in the following format:
• #oxegen 5 Queens of the Stone Age. Greatest band on the planet. Live set blew my mind
• So the format is: #oxegen RatingOutOf5 Thing. ReviewText

That’s it!

We announced LouderTweets recently, which are 140 character mini-reviews you can send to LouderVoice from Twitter without needing a LouderVoice account.

Last night we turned on LouderViesti which is the equivalent feature for the superb Jaiku. Jaiku is like Twitter but can do much much more. They are based in Finland and are adding great features at a fast rate.

We are now calling LouderTweets+LouderViesti = LouderMinis!

Using LouderViesti is even easier than LouderTweets.

We’re had some feedback from non-Twitter users that they’d like to try out LouderTweets but the original instructions were a bit obscure. Here is the step by step.

1. You don’t need to have a LouderVoice account

2. Sign Up for a Twitter account here. All you need to provide is name, username and email address

3. You don’t need to invite anyone else in so skip that step

4. Go over the the “review” user’s page here

After a few late nights we’re now ready to let you send reviews from Twitter to LouderVoice. We’re calling them LouderTweets and they are 140 character mini-reviews you can send using Web, SMS or IM via Twitter to LouderVoice.

An important point is that you don’t have to be a LouderVoice member to send LouderTweets but you should join if you want to rate, bookmark or build/share useful collections of reviews.

We’ve just uploaded the first public release of our Firefox Add-on. This gives you a pop-up review writing window for Firefox so you can review anything when and where you like without having to go to our site. To make things as easy as possible, we pre-fill the URL and item name fields with those from the page you are currently browsing. If you select some text on that page first, then we’ll pre-fill the summary with that text too.

Tom Raftery recently interviewed Conor the CEO for the first ever episode of his video podcasts. If you want to find out about every aspect of LouderVoice from inception to why we use comma separated tags, then have a look. Thanks Tom!

Rather than having to go to LouderVoice to write a review and entering a bunch of information from scratch by hand, we now have a simple button for your browser (both Internet Explorer and Firefox) which makes the process even easier.

If you are browsing any web page that has information about an item you’d like to review, just click the button. We’ll give you a review writing screen with the item name and URL pre-populated. Write your review, click the publish button and that review is now on your blog!

We now have hReview plug-ins available for WordPress.org v2.0.x/v2.1.x and WordPress MU v1.2.1

These plug-ins allow you to write correctly formatted reviews directly on your blog that our site and several others can collect and interpret properly. You no longer have to visit the LouderVoice site to write your reviews!

Once you write a review using the plug-in (simply by clicking “Insert Review” when writing any blog post) we will collect it and make it searchable on LouderVoice.

At 4am this morning, we unlocked LouderVoice. An enormous amount of work has gone into this over recent weeks and we’re all pleased as punch with the result. A big thank you to Lee and Blair and everyone else who got it out the door.

Head on over and check it out. Sign up for an account and publish some reviews to your blog. There are still some teething problems in there but let us know what you think.

Yes, we’re very mean but it’s looking fan-diddley-tastic.

Tick tock.

We’re attending TheNextWeb Conference in Amsterdam on June 1st. It looks like it will be an awesome day and we are aiming to show off LouderVoice to a big audience. The organisers have put together an awards site and we’d really appreciate a vote for LouderVoice in the Beta & Stealth Category. Whilst you are there, a vote for Pixenate in the Disruptors Category would make a lot of sense!

For which we apologise. But we are getting ready for a nice soft launch in the near future and have had our heads down trying to create a great site. The new features are looking awesome and our add-ons make it even better.

Just give us a little bit more time. I think you’ve going to like it!

Thanks for stopping by. LouderVoice will hopefully be launching in April, so stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed of this blog.

What’s LouderVoice all about?

We’ll provide the tools that let you publish reviews to your blog in a specific way. Other users can then find those reviews via our site, read them on your blog and then rate them and do useful things with them. Great reviewers will be able to build their reputations and those looking for great reviews finally have a place where quality bubbles to the top.

The current version of the WordPress Rich Text Editor causes us “some pain” due to its mangling of things like divs which we use in our microformats markup. We’re interested to know what percentage of WordPress users (both wordpress.com and hosted wordpress.org) actually use it. Here’s a little PollDaddy poll to that end:

John Allsopp, of the seriously good Microformatique site, has just released a book called “Microformats – empowering your markup for Web 2.0″. John has been writing on microformats for quite a while now and it is great to see this book emerge. You can get it on amazon.com or .co.uk

In this book, noted web developer and long time WaSP member John Allsop teaches all you need to know about the technology: what Microformats are currently available and how to use them; the general principles of how they work, so you’ll be able to understand and use future Microformat; how to use Microformats with web sites and software that already support them; and how to create your own. The focus is kept on practical examples as much as possible throughout.

We’ve just started rolling out invites to current beta testers to point their LouderVoice accounts at their own blogs instead of our reviewblogs. There are still one or two small glitches to iron out but overall things are very solid. The braver testers can go ahead and try to figure it out for themselves! Otherwise we’ll be sending out the instructions in the coming days.

A big thanks to our Swedish guru for managing to get us working with the new Blogger platform using the old API!

We should be enabling external blog publishing on LouderVoice this week. Just to give you some sense of how things look in the wild, here are some of the test blogs we are using. We should be adding Blogger to the list this afternoon:

• WordPress MU: LouderVoice Review Blogs
• WordPress.org: Bandon Blog
• WordPress.com: d’Other Blog
• Movable Type: I love it, I love it not
• TypePad: Conor’s Very Typetastic Pad
• LiveJournal: The Live Arguer

I’ve blogged many times in the past about what a wonderful set of products VMWare have and not just because EMC used to be a customer of Argolon way back. In the last year we have been avid users of VMWare Server. However it has recently been annoying the hell out of us as it required hacking around to get it running on Fedora Core 6. Bizzarely I could run FC6 inside VMWare on XP but could not get VMWare running on FC6 so I could run FC6 in it!

I’ve proposed having an OpenCoffee Club meeting next week in Cork City. Read the details over at Argolon.

We hit a hard-to-reproduce bug yesterday on the main site and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it. One thing we’ve done is turn on debug messages so if anything goes wrong you may find yourself facing a screen full of red text. If you do, it’d be a huge help if  you could copy n paste it into a mail and send to beta1 at loudervoice dot com.  In fact if you spot any anomalies at all, please let us know so we can improve the stability for everyone.

The most important feature of LouderVoice (in fact its whole point) is the ability to publish structured reviews to your blog and for us to collect them too. This has not been enabled during Beta test yet and I know many of you are dying to test it out. I hope we can turn it on very very soon and this is just to let you know where we are both in development and testing.

I’ve made good use of Meebo in the past working for silly places that block external IM but I’ve avoided putting the MeeboMe widget on our blogs for one simple reason; I’d have to have to be logged into Meebo in a browser window to get the messages rather than receiving them in my IM client where they belong.

Well it looks like I was totally wrong and you can configure Gaim or any other Jabber client to receive the messages from those who try to contact you on your blog via the MeeboMe widget. In Gaim you just add a new account where type=jabber, user=your_meebo_login, server=meebo.org and password=your_meebo password.

We deployed Beta2 of the site last Monday but a few problems have held us up. Most of the big clangers are now fixed  and I’m going to start issuing more invites today. Even if you are not a Beta Tester, head on over to loudervoice.com to check out the very slick new look.

In terms of functinality, the main focus was on usability and stability. There are not many visible new features there compared to Beta1. The most visible changes are that all actions on results are “in-situ” rather than sending you off to different pages.

Only a couple of days late, we deployed Beta2 to www.loudervoice.com (moving from beta.loudervoice.com). There are a few teething problems in there but the overall behaviour and look of the site is far far superior to Beta1.

I’ll be back from FoWA tomorrow and will start sending out lots more Beta Test invites.

I’d like to encourage all current beta testers to log on and give us their feedback on the changes and tell us what you’d really like to see for the Full Launch.

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.

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.

I was very surprised to see ATOM 1.0 did not make it into WordPress 2.1, especially considering I installed a third party implementation months ago (can’t remember from who at this stage) . Sam points the guys to plenty of implementations.

All feeds from LouderVoice will be ATOM 1.0.

UPDATE 1: I actually read this post by Matt before I blogged and somehow managed to completely miss the mention of ATOM. Here’s looking forward to 2.2!

Finally the question is answered: LouderVoice is all about reviews but with a BIG difference.

Instead of expecting you to spend time and effort writing reviews for us, we’re about your reviews on your blog building your reputation.

We provide the tools that enable you to publish structured reviews to your blog (hReview for the techies out there) and we’ll help everyone else to find your reviews, read them on your blog and then rate them and relate them to reviews by other bloggers. Our job is, above all, to be useful.

If you run any version of WordPress on a WeFaction hosted account you’ll run into the problem of sendmail being disabled so none of the notification mails get sent out. The way around this is to install the wpPHPMailer plug-in which uses SMTP instead. To get around the catch-22 of needing it installed to get your WP password, you’ll have to do the WP install, then go into phpMyAdmin and change your password using the MD5 function in the wp_users table and then login and enable the plugin and set the mail server options.

If you live and breathe web development, then head on over to the main company site to see what we are looking for.

I’m heading over to the second Irish BarCamp in Waterford this Saturday. I currently don’t plan to give any talks as I have had zero time to prepare anything (darned start-ups!). I will be on one of the panels and I’ll be actively contributing to lots of the discussions (like Donncha‘s).

If you spot me, do say hello. I’m staying the Saturday night so there’ll be tons of time to shoot the breeze.

I was excited for a very short period this evening when I spotted on Ryan Carson’s blog that there was an opportunity for web app startups to get on stage for 10 minutes in front of the entire audience of FOWA. There were only three spots left. I was just about to shoot off an email saying “me me me” when I spotted the final line “The cost is £5k”.

I’m still stunned. Surely the only start-ups that can afford to spend 5k are the ones who are already funded and who don’t actually need the PR? I was highly critical of LeWeb3 but Loic deserves great credit for the start-up room idea where the cost was a big fat zero. I would never begrudge anyone making a few quid but it seems like the highest cost is being targeted at those least able to afford it.

Ah c’mon, no “Best Microformats Blog”? Or “Best use of the word Beta in a Blog”?

There are, however, categories for Best Business Blog and Best Newcomer……..

Head on over and vote for all your faves.

Technorati Tags: iba2007, Irish+Blog+Awards, Damien+Mulley

The past week has been very educational with the bugs and issues being reported by the Beta Testers. We actually went with Friends and Family, many of whom are non-technical to do the first round of testing. I really wanted to see how they interacted with the site. Whilst we gave instructions on use, they were not overly detailed on purpose. In any case most testers didn’t read them 😉

We were aware of many of the bugs but a few really caught us by surprise and all of them will need to be fixed for Beta2. Some issues we considered low priority to fix turned out to be the opposite for all the users and we need to sort them out asap as it will also reduce the maintenance load on us.

With 1.5 hours to spare we have just issued the first Beta Test invite. That means we meet our Q4 2006 deadline 🙂

Phew. More invites coming soon.

We’ve been using WebFaction for all the LouderVoice hosting mainly because they come highly recommended by the TurboGears and Python communities (and donate to the TG project). So far we’ve been very happy with the service, performance and ease of deployment. Their recent launch of an API which allows people to script one-click installs of many applications for use by others has proven to be a very popular move.

They have just given one more reason for using them: They’ve added one long-running process and 40MB of RAM to all plans. Not only that but they’ve doubled the diskspace and quadrupled the bandwidth included in each plan.

The system is up and running solidly for the past few days out on the interwebs. I had hoped to start Beta1 invites today but there are still one or two problems which I really want to get closed before we do. I’m also working on the test guidelines, roadmap and known-problems lists. As soon as we’re ready, I’ll let you know.

If you are even remotely interested in trying out Beta1 or Beta2, head on over to the main landing page to sign up.

It’s great to see the new Blogger come out of beta, it is a big step forward from the old one. But I find it strange that they seem to be deprecating all the old APIs whilst only providing Java, .Net and PHP libraries for the new APIs. I’m surprised that a company that does so much in Python, employs Guido van Rossum and just bought YouTube which, according to Guido, is written in Python (wow!), does not have ATOM/GData libraries available in that language.

We’ve finally put up the email collector on the LouderVoice holding page. If you want to be part of the trials, please sign up.

The plan at the moment is that we’ll be inviting a very small number of people we know into the Beta1 phase in the next few days. This is because we know there are missing features and some holes in the exception handling but it is still a highly functional application and we want to get that initial feedback. The focus in that phase is around features not stability. Questions we will be asking include:

A lovely new extension/addon for Firefox called Operator has just been announced over at Mozilla Labs. Its basic functionality is similar to Tails and Tails Export in that it detects microformats on web pages and allows you to do “stuff” with them but it looks like the author, Michael Kaply at IBM, has big plans for Operator and felt that he could not achieve that with the existing tools.

Some of the things you can do include:

I’m afraid this post is in the same tone as most of the others I’ve read about Le Web 3 – the shark was truly jumped. Did my attendance fee pay for the security for Shimon Peres and the French presidential candidates? Was I at Le Web or Les Grands Buddies de Loic?

Whilst the lack of functioning wifi was deeply annoying for attendees and was a PR disaster for Orange, it was completely unacceptable and frankly amateurish for them not to have dedicated bandwidth for the startup room. The inability of Web-based startups to show their products live at Le Web was laughable and the shrug-attitude of the organisers about this must have been horribly frustrating for those who put all that effort into their preparation.

Electric News has done a nice article about PXN8, PutPlace and LouderVoice attending Le Web 3. I’m thrilled we are in such great company. There may also be a mention in the newspapers tomorrow. Damien came up trumps again for us all.

The Cork crew are taking an early flight on Sunday and arriving CDG at 13:45. If anyone wants to hook up at any stage, just call me or text me (Conor) on +353-87-9790297. I’m aiming to be at this party on Sunday night and the official one on Monday night. I have to leave early afternoon on Tuesday so don’t forget to catch that pigeon.

Today is the day the code and the design have to come together. We’ve made great progress this week in figuring out some of the more annoying glitches, not all of which are due to the application code. In particular I have to admit that WordPress is breaking our hearts with its bloody content sanitization. class inside abbr is not dangerous so why strip it out? We’re having a lot more success with MT and LJ.

Usually this is quoted as a negative but in our case it is entirely positive. The TechCrunch coverage lit a little fire underneath us and pushed me to finally get some lovin’ applied to the design of the prototype. We have engaged a superb designer who I met at BarCamp Ireland to just do something quick and simple for next week. The timeline is crazy but his first proposal was absolutely spot-on and we’re running with it. It is a clean, uncluttered, intelligent design to match the *cough*, clean, uncluttered, intelligent application. Now we just have to try and tie everything together for Friday.

Sam Sethi over at TechCrunch UK&I has done a blog post about LouderVoice, saying

LouderVoice one to catch at Le Web 3

I’m blushing just writing it. There goes all our expectation setting out the window! We’re thrilled to get the coverage and I hope we can live up to it.

Due to the oddness of flight times from Ireland to France, the Cork contingent will actually be arriving early afternoon on Sunday 10th Dec. If anyone else is around on Sunday, I’d love to meet up. Catch me on +353-87-9790297 or email me in advance at conor@loudervoice.com. We might even try to organise a dinner on the Sunday night.

After a short delay, we had our prototype Alpha walkthrough today and it really is a humdinger. It’s now at the “show it to someone and they’ll get it instantly” stage. Sure there are a few small bugs and it hasn’t had a Trinny and Susannah makeover for the design but it just feels right.

We bounced a few ideas back and forth on expected user behavior but you could spend from now until eternity doing that. We’ll just have to get it into the hands of some users to see what they do.

I had a chat yesterday with another Irish entrepreneur about some dev shops I had investigated. Afterwards I sent him on a list of outsourcing vendors that impressed me during my research (but I haven’t used). It struck me this morning that it might be useful to create some sort of wiki or group blog where those involved in software development in Ireland could list vendors they have used and like or who have been recommended to them or who look good. Basically a very simplistic dev-niche variation on HandyMan.ie.

Damien, he of 1000 ideas, all of them good, asked a bunch of us for our top 5 business tips. Here are mine re-published with some extra context. Nothing too deep, just solid practical stuff I’ve learned in 14 years of working in tech, many of those in start-ups.

Talk to as many people who can advise you as possible both in and out of your business area. Most people are happy to help and advise.

Just a re-direct to loudervoice.com but no harm in having it there as most of the Alpha testers are likely to be Irish. Now to get the email harvester up and running.

As I’ve said before, we are building our prototype using the TurboGears Web Application framework. Kevin Dangoor (the leader of the project), Mark Ramm and Gigi Sayfan have just released the first book about this great framework. It is currently the #20 tech book on Amazon. In addition to the paper copy, a Rough Cuts PDF version is available over at Safari Books and this is the version I have been using.

Documentation has always been TG’s biggest weakness and I believe it has hampered its growth. With this book and the current big push by the community to get all the docs in order, that criticism will soon go away. If you are a fan of rapid development for web applications, you should check out turbogears.org and consider purchasing the book.

Registration has just opened for the next Future of Web Apps conference in London on Feb 20-22. I’ve just signed up to attend. I should have PLENTY to talk about at that stage. Anyone else thinking of heading over from Ireland? It’s a great line-up of speakers including Mike Arrington, Bradley Horowitz, Tara Hunt and Jeremy Keith.

I just love buzzwords and acronyms. I’m still deeply disappointed that my Tim Bray derived PECK (People Contributed Experience and Knowledge) as a replacement for UGC never caught on. Now we have an attempt to get Web 3.0 used to describe what’s coming next.

There has been enormous reaction to John Markoff’s article in The NYT about Web 3.0 and the “Grand Semantic Web”. As anyone who has read the Argolon blog will know, we belong to the lower-case “upright semantic web” faction. And yes that was a dreadful attempt at a piano metaphor. Of all the commentary, the one I’m most aligned with is Ross Mayfield’s and in particular his statement

At the moment I am wrestling with the idea of releasing very early. The prototype will have about 60% of what I view as the “full” functionality. It will have the core features of the service for the individual but will be missing the community features. The current plan is that we get the full drop of the prototype, go through a test and fix phase and then ask in a bunch of friendly faces to try it and and tell us what they think. Part of this would be a discussion on the planned features for the full system to see what made sense to them and what did not. We would then go for the full scalable development for wider release in Q1 followed hopefully by public release later in Q1.

Mike Butcher has just written about Money Mondays which is a wonderful idea. In his words:

Each Monday for a month, starting on Monday 20th November, we’ll showcase, and publish contact details for, a web or mobile startup which has yet to secure formal funding. They will have to have either an application of their idea up and running (e.g. a live web site) or a working demo or beta we can look at.

When we first kicked off this new venture, I made a few simple decisions on technology. The first was that we were going to take an agile approach with everything and particularly using agile languages and web frameworks. Over the past ten years I’ve had major success with projects which used Tcl, Perl and Python where the accepted wisdom would often have been to build some monster C++ or Java app. Most of those projects were not web related but some of the more recent ones were and the productivity of the developers was often gob-smacking.

It now has an embedded hCard with our minimal contact details. There is also a link which you can click on to grab a VCF for import into Outlook. This obviously won’t be the only use of microformats on the site 😉

Oh and, cough, it now passes the W3C validator.

I just commented over at Eirepreneur that you should pay no attention to the design of the landing page at loudervoice.com. That is literally the default page in any TurboGears app with the text changed. In fact the server is not even running TG yet. We’ll do that when we add a sign-up for beta facility in the coming weeks.

We’ve had LouderVoice.com since the name was decided. BTW feel free to comment on the name, we purposely avoided the current obsession with madey-up nonsense names and went with something descriptive. Since then I’ve added the usual bunch of .org, .net, .co.uk and even .biz because GoDaddy were doing dirt cheap deals.

Of course .ie had to be just that bit more difficult and had to wait until we fulfilled one of the criteria. We achieved this today by successfully registering LOUDERVOICE as a business name with the CRO for €20. I was pleasantly surprised to get notification that we now have loudervoice.ie a few short hours after we purchased it over at Blacknight.

Last Thursday was a pretty momentous day for LouderVoice. The first code drop was delivered and installed. We have finally moved from talking and speccing to actually having functional code. It is still very very early days and the code just has the bare bones of the required feature set. But even at this stage, the potential is obvious. I was buzzing for days afterwards and I’m hugely impressed with the progress in a few short weeks.

Let us know what you think. Thanks to Elance and Lanoel Studios for coming up with a first-time-right design. We’ll now start doing the colour scheme for the blog and the site based on these logos.