The LouderVoice Blog

Taste of Cork Competition Winner

2008-07-08T12:00:32-05:00

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.

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Win a Gift Hamper for Taste of Cork Reviews

2008-06-24T06:46:38-05:00

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.

And we have an absolute corker of a prize for the most popular review. It’s a BBQ Hamper from Spicendipity, a new Irish online food store which literally launched today! They sell homemade sauces and 100% natural spice mixes and baking mixes.

The prize contains:

Two bottles of their signature Two Brew BBQ Sauce to slather your chicken, ribs, or steak
One Italian Seasoning Mix, perfect for dips and marinades
One Tex Mex Spice Mix, ideal for spicy dips and meat rubs
One Beer Bread Mix for the perfect accompaniment to your meal
One Brownie Mix for the perfect ending
A BBQ cookery book, grill tongs, bamboo skewers and a tea towel to mop it all up with.

The Taste of Cork event runs from Friday 27th to Sunday 29th in the old City Gaol in Sunday’s Well. The more reviews you write, the better chance you have of winning. We’ll keep the competition open until Sunday 6th July to give you plenty of time to get those reviews in and increase your viewing figures.

Based on the reviews of Taste Of Dublin recently, this should be a great few days.

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LouderVoice now supported on Profilactic

2008-06-15T07:56:02-05:00

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.

A very nice app with an inspired name

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New version of LouderVoice Wordpress Plug-in

2008-06-04T02:42:17-05:00

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.

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Another competition winner

2008-04-03T07:50:47-05:00

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’ll be kicking off the next phase of the competition very shortly and we’re totally open to suggestions on the type of prizes.

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LouderVoice Wordpress Plug-in Version 2

2008-03-30T08:30:50-05:00

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.

So what’s changed? Everything!

It is compatible with Wordpress.org from V2.0.3 to the brand new V2.5
It now integrates into the normal blog-post editor instead of being a pop-up
The extra markup is no longer stored inline in the blog-post body so there is no danger of damaging the extra review information if you go back to edit a post
We’ve dropped the summary field and just use the first paragraph of the body as the summary
LouderVoice tags are optional, we can make use of tags from all the major tagging systems on Wordpress including the built-in one
The plug-in pings LouderVoice when you post a new review. Indexing of new reviews should therefore be faster
The rating stars are stored locally in the plug-in dir so you can easily change them to suit yourself

What hasn’t changed? It is still microformats compliant and it is still GPL, so hack away if you want to change anything.

A big thanks to John Blackbourn for all the development effort.

Download it from here and please let us know what you think. Heck, why not review it

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What is LouderVoice V2 all about?

2008-03-30T03:57:38-05:00

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.

The number one request from users was the ability to write reviews directly on the site. There are many times when your blog or micro-blog just isn’t the appropriate place to write a particular review and we now support on-site reviewing with Google Maps integration, item images and the ability for others to comment on your reviews. You can now finally save drafts too.

One neat feature is that if you send an SMS review to the site, you can add mapping and image information to it later. Speaking of SMS reviews, you can now sign-up automatically on the site via SMS by simply sending your first review.

Other goodies include avatar image support, a simplified useful/not_useful voting system, lots of small improvements and a more scalable back-end. Of course, as always, we support the collection/publishing of reviews from all the major blog platforms and collection from Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce.

Our popular Wordpress plug-in has been totally redesigned from scratch and is a huge improvement. We’ll launch that in the next day or two when test is complete on Wordpress 2.5.

What’s coming next? We still have a bunch of buglets to fix and then we’ll be adding improvements to the commenting system, activity stream and some of the RSS feeds on the site. We will add support for some video sites very shortly and some of the Social Networking sites after that.

We are going live very soon with our API on a major partner site. Our SMS customer feedback system with dedicated keywords is also live and you can expect some announcements there too in the short term.

And you wondered why we had been so quiet here!

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Irish Blog Awards Winners

2008-03-03T04:10:22-06:00

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:

Best Pop Culture Blog: Rick O’Shea
Best Blog from a Journalist: Present Tense
Best Food/Drink Blog: Italian Foodies
Best Crafts Blog: A Simple Yarn
Best Arts and Culture Blog: Sinead Gleeson: The Sigla Blog
Best Political Blog: Irish Election
Best Group Blog: Beaut.ie
Best Use Of Irish Language In A Blog: Blag Ghael gan Náire
Best Technology Blog: Bytesurgery
Best Designed Blog: Sabrina Dent
Best Sports and Recreation Blog: ArseBlog
Best News/Current Affairs Blog: The Limerick Blog and Maman Poulet
Best Specialist Blog: The Voyage
Best Newcomer: John Braine
Best Business Blog: Ice Cream Ireland
Best Music Blog: Nialler9
Best Personal Blog: Head Rambles, Grannymar
Most Humorous Post: Twenty Major
Best Photo Blog: GingerPixel
Best Blog Post: Fat Mammy Cat
Best Blog: Twenty Major
Special Recognition: Simon McGarr, Rymus, Rick O’Shea

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Blog Awards Best Post Finalists

2008-02-27T13:39:59-06:00

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

Hope we see some interesting schwag on the night too!

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Chips in Tipp

2008-02-27T04:11:07-06:00

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?

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