Well… its all getting very exciting in the States. The level of interest in this years primary season is unprecedented this side of the Atlantic. Even at work my politically agnostic colleagues are debating the ups and downs of each candidate’s progress…

So I put to you loyal Bifsniffers… predict the winner! I’ll settle for a Republican and Democratic nominee for now, but if anyone is willing I’ll accept outright winners too!

For the record I’d like to see Barak Obama take the oath on Jan 20th 2009!

Wait Until Dark opens in the Cork Arts Theatre tomorrow, directed by none other than my own mother - and tickets for tomorrow night’s performance are on a 2 for 1 offer.

Director Mairin Prendergast, who is well known in Cork Theatre circles, received great reviews for her own acting performance in the Sunbeam Girls last year, and has previously directed Skylight Production’s Dracula in the Firkin Crane.

Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott & presented by Skylight Productions.

London, the swinging sixties, a model, a doll, a psychopath, two ex-cons…..a spine chilling thriller.

Wait Until Dark was written by Frederick Knott, who you might know as the author of ‘Dial M For Murder’ which was made into a film by Hitchcock. Wait Until Dark was also made into a film with Audrey Hepburn.

Wait Until dark is a suspenseful and intrigueing psychological thriller which builds to a chilling climax. The heroine is a blind woman who has unwittingly become the target of three thugs who believe her to be in posession of a quantity of smuggled drugs hidden in a doll. The thugs devise a complex plan to rob her of the doll.

And here’s the trailer for the film version:

Dear Friends,

Here is our february Bulletin with lots and lots of news, plays, workshops, auditions, and many other interesting bits of information about the theatre world in Cork. There is something for everybody. We hope you find something for you!! If you are interested, keep reading!

Best wishes,

Marcus

(more…)

You may have noticed lately a spate of film reviews with star ratings, like this review for Gone Baby gone, these were done using the WordPress plugin for LouderVoice.

Loudervoice is a very clever review site… like a ‘community driven review aggregator’, if you like. In other words it pulls together reviews written by people on a whole host of technologies - SMS, Twitter, Blogs and other popular platforms, and it also allows users to then rate the reviews themselves, so that over time you can learn to trust reviews based on the rating they got from other users.

So if I review Gone Baby Gone and other people who have seen the film agree with me, they will rate my review highly and you can assume the review is fairly dependable.

Right now LouderVoice is really in it’s infancy, and the more people who jump on board, the more useful the site will become.

More users on LouderVoice means:

• More useful review content for visitors to the site
• More meaningful ratings on the reviews themselves
• More visitors to the site who are looking for reviews for items, and therefore more traffic to blogs like this one who input reviews.

So the bigger LouderVoice gets the more useful it gets both as a source of dependable reviews for items, and a source of traffic for websites/blogs who provide review content.

LouderVoice is constantly improving and updating it’s services, at the moment a complete overhaul is scheduled to be rolled out in the next month or so. The current site makes it a little difficult to get your head around the value of LouderVoice, but I believe the new site will be fantastic - watch for it.

Currently, the latest rollout from LouderVoice is Flag Tags (yes, I came up with the name, so shoot me if you hate it - apart from that I have no affilliation with LouderVoice apart from being signed up!). Flag Tags are tags you give a blog post to alert LouderVoice that the blog post is a LouderVoice review.

All you have to do to use them is first log into your LouderVoice account and in your settings add a source for LouderVoice to look for reviews. You add your blog’s RSS feed and from then on you include the name of the item you are reviewing in the blog post title and simply add two tags:

1. the word “review”
2. A tag/label “rating=N” where N is an integer from 1 to 5

Makes blogging LouderVoice reviews extremely easy. I highly recommend checking out LouderVoice, you can review by blogging, SMS, Twitter or directly on the LouderVoice website itself.

Tell ‘em I sent you!

Technorati Tags: review, rating=5, flag tags