Soapbox for reviews
Soapbox is a website where you can write reviews…take a look at it, it’s way too simple and not engaging, it needs much more to induce a community.
I do think it can be better, and I’ve spoken before about review website possibilities.
It could basically take the Otavo approach, or basically the social network approach…where you have your own user space to write, and tag reviews (kind of like a review link blog). Then others can comment or rate your review…also other reviews for the same product could be displayed together (maybe tags can do this).
It could take the CommonGate approach to divide reviews up into communal/network topic category blogs.
For those who have their own blog another approach could be building on re-syndication, first register your blog/s, and then it would re-syndicate posts that you have tagged review (kind of like an RSS feed for your “review” tag).
NOTE: it will also re-syndicate the other tags you have applied to your blog post, this way you can discover lists by keyword.
I like the idea of making your blog a hub to other environments, eg. you can see all your blog posts with the tag “review” in your blog, or you could see these same posts in another environment like Soapbox, where there are other posts of the same nature that you can discover.
Likewise all your posts tagged “list” (eg. see 3spots popular posts - these are list type blog posts that are always updated), could be re-syndicated into a list/topic type service like ListerLister, Fanpop, etc…
And so on…you could have 5 tags or blog category content being re-syndicated into portals that house like content in a social networking (sharing and discovery) environment.
Instead of re-syndicating content from certain tags in your blog to different portals, imagine one portal that housed them all.
eg. The homepage could have tabs (representing each tag/portal), your user space will also have the same 5 tabs or blogs (or one blog with 5 sections).
In your user space you can see all your posts from all tags like a river of news, or just posts from one tab…people can rate, comment, subscribe to your tabs.
Same in the home page, you can see all posts from the “review” tab, from the “list” tab, from the “event” tab, etc…
It’s like registering your blog with Technorati Tags, and just say there only existed 5 type tags like “review, “list” “event”, etc…and each of these tags was not just a stream of posts, but a social network.
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I think that’s a winner, smartly gathering content. I thought something similar when I tried to write a short review at NeoBinaries, why rewrite a review if you have one?
If there were to be many reviews, they should just list the titles or use an expande collapse system AND let reader rate it, so the best ones get to the top.
Or maybe it could just list ‘who talks about this’ ego link?
I hope they read this post.
Comment by 3spots — August 18, 2006 @ 8:32 pm
Hi,
A number of bloggers like you have been asking for the ability to syndicate their blogs onto Soapbox. Other bloggers I’ve spoken to seem pretty fond of the idea as well. I like what you said about your blog being a hub to other environments.
I wanted to let you know that I just released the feature you asked for. I’d love any feedback you might have to help make it better.
Here’s the description of the feature:
http://soapboxit.com/info/for_bloggers
Thanks!
Duff OMelia
http://soapboxit.com
Comment by Duff OMelia — September 5, 2006 @ 8:46 pm