Call15 have a new way of getting cheap international calls from your mobile. Check it out:

1. You have to be with O2
2. You dial a Call15 number to get a preset number of minutes (there are different numbers for different call lengths).
3. You then dial the number you wish to speak with.
4. You get a warning when you have less than a minute left, in time to say your goodbyes and end your call.
5. You get billed a set amount to your account.

That’s it. No set up, no registering, no codes to remember, no standing on one leg and rubbing your tummy while holding your phone in the air.

Until I tried it out, and double checked everything, I had trouble believing it could be so simple, easy and cheap - so in case you are like me and ridiculously sceptical here it is again:

• Call the special number
• Dial in the international number
• Talk
• Pay a set rate for a set amount of minutes.

So if I tell you the numbers now, and you have an O2 phone, you can get cheaper international calls right now. The numbers are always the same, but the rates differ somewhat depending on the country you are calling - check out their site for full details.

Here are the numbers, and example rates which at the time of posting applied to the UK, France, Spain and Italy (Poland is even cheaper than rates below!):

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I may in the future do some illustrative work for Call15.com which is how I came across them (yes, i work as well as post on BifSniff - oh, and thanks to Pat Phelan for the introduction!) but I wrote this post simply as someone who has seen his bill spike horribly from calls to family in the UK and can see the HUGE potential in such an easy way to cut costs.

As an added bonus, Call15 are currently running a competition to win an iPhone, and are also giving away O2 sim cards (for a limited time) - so if you’re not currently with O2 you can still start making cheap calls.

If you try this out, let me know what you think… am I overly excited about this? Is it old news? Have I been living under a rock? The new economising Frank is well impressed.

You’ve also got to be of a certain age to appreciate it. My slide viewer was a Hanimex and I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I got it. Anyway go check your attics or wherever else your old junk is stored..

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

Remember those books when you were a kid that taught you how to send secret messages using lemon juice?

Well for the current generation here’s how to send a secret text message in a jpeg image…