By Conor O'Neill | January 29, 2008
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 blogpost must be the name of the thing you are reviewing (optionally prefixed with “Review Of”)
- One of the tags/labels must be the word “review”
- Another tag/label must “rating=N” where N is an integer from 1 to 5
Any other tags/labels are at your discretion to assist the categorisation of your review
A review on Blogger (or WordPress, Typepad, Movable Type etc) might look like this:
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Once you let us know the RSS feed for you blog, we’ll monitor it for those three things in your posts and pull in the reviews that we see. As always, we link back to your blog on our site so that people can read the full review. That review above would appear like this on LouderVoice:
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In a few days we’ll provide a little “bookmarklet” which will provide a nice easy way to optionally insert star graphics in your post.
So head on over to your “My Settings” page on LouderVoice and add your Blog’s RSS feed to the “Flag Tags Reviews” source type. Of course you can always mix and match between the two types of reviews on your blog.