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Data Blogging Scenarios 1 - Reviews

Wed 12 Sep 2007

Following on from my earlier data blogging post, and along the lines of Jon Udell's lifebits scenarios, here's the first in a series of posts exploring some ideas about how data blogging might be interesting in today's Web 2.0 world.

Easy one first: Reviews.

When I write a review on my blog of a book I've read or a movie I've seen, it should be trivial to syndicate this as a review to multiple relevant websites. My book reviews might go to Amazon (who else does good user book review aggregation out there?), movies reviews to IMDB, Yahoo Movies, Netflix, etc.

I'm already writing prose, so I should just be able to mark it up as a microformats hReview, add some tags to control syndication, and have that content available via one or more RSS or Atom feeds.

I should then just be able to go to my Amazon account, give it the url for the feed I want it to monitor for reviews, and - voila! - instant user-driven content syndication.

This is a win-win isn't it? Amazon gets to use my review on its website, but I get to retain a lot more control in the process:

  • I can author content using my choice of tools instead of filling out a textarea on the Amazon website

  • I can easily syndicate content to multiple sites, and/or syndicate content selectively as well

  • I can make updates and corrections according to my policies, rather than Amazon's (Amazon would of course still be able to decide what to do with such updates)

  • I should be able to revoke access to my content to specific websites if they do stupid stuff

  • I and my readers get the benefit of retaining and aggregating my content on my blog, and all your standard blogging magic (comments, trackbacks, tagclouds, etc.) still apply

It would probably also be nice if Amazon included a link back to the review on my blog which would drive additional traffic my way, and allow interested Amazon users to follow any further conversations (comments and trackbacks etc.) that have happened there.

So are there any sites out there already doing this?

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Comments (2)

  1. Hi Gavin,

    You have just described our site, LouderVoice!

    We aggregate reviews from registered blogs in hReview format, provide a reviews search engine and then direct readers to the source blogs.

    We currently support most blog platforms (Wordpress, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad etc) and provide several hreview publishing tools too.

    In the next two weeks we'll add more source types so we can aggregate all those platfroms which don't support hreview.

    - Comment by Conor O'Neill at 2007-09-25 01:40.

  2. Thanks Conor, I'll have to check LouderVoice out.

    - Comment by Gavin at 2007-10-02 23:06.

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