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