Soapbox can import your blog reviews automatically |
Do you have a blog and share reviews with readers? Soapboxit.com is a one developer created site done in Ruby on Rails that takes reviews from your blog, with permission (implicit tagging inside each review post), so that others can subscribe to the reviewers they like.
Rafe Colburn likes how Soapbox will import the appropriately tagged reviews:
Lots of people already post reviews on their blogs. Soapbox will subscribe to your blog’s feed and import any appropriately tagged posts as reviews.
I agree with Rafe, this is a slick way to crosspost. The proper Soapbox tag to include in your blog uses a thumbs up/down distinction that looks like this:
You can reach this after registering and going to your preferences page. During registration I experienced a server error trying to review the TOS, which hopefully has been fixed.
If you view the source of this post you’ll see which code I used for this entry on the concept. I’ll have to come back in an update to see how long it takes to find this review and add to the Soapboxit.com site. While it would have made sense to have tested with another review post first I wanted to test how it deals with updates to a post, so this will intentionally be a two part dynamic post review. Kind of unfair since this is the first review of this type I’ve ever done here. It will be interesting to see if Soapbox picks up on the additional text when I update the post and/or if I change the rating.
Ok, the clock is ticking, it’s 11:16am PST.
Part 2 - the dynamic review
- well it didn’t show up yet (7 minutes) and text on the site indicates that the system might look only once per day? Part 2 could take awhile to happen if that’s the case. I’ll check back in an hour or two.
2:21pm PST: I just noticed that the developer Duff responded below and this review appeared on Soapbox. Had to adjust the htaccess here so the images would show up ok hotlinked which I’ve done and is now shown on my soapboxit page.
I like how Duff personally showed up and is open to feedback both good and bad. Thanks Duff. He also explains how the update to existing reviews works in detail and that indeed there is only one update per day currently. However, review writers can refresh their feed when they make changes. I don’t see much logic in making changes only on Soapbox unless one wanted to make a special version of the review. I’m going to try refreshing right now and see how it goes.
Final thoughts and feedback
2:36pm PST: I like the start that Soapbox is off to and as said above, I see this as a good method of crossposting with implicit approval certain content to third party sites. Additional features that would make Soapbox even more handy would be:
- full export functionality. I would like the ability at any time to be able to export all reviews imported into Soapbox.
- support for starred reviews (1-5) rather than just thumbs up or down, this way we could sort reviews from trusted reviewers as opposed to only positive or negative. And shouldn’t there at least be a neutral for reviews that are neither positive or negative?
- marking reviews as rating similar to gravatar (G, PG, R, X) because I’m sure somebody will want to mix in adult reviews sooner or later on some blog. Without being able to look through the Soapbox TOS (is this fixed yet, Duff?) I wasn’t able to see if Duff thought through the whole adult reviews section of the web and this could prove to be offensive to other Soapboxers if adult reviews start showing up mixed with mainstream.
Soapbox is off to a good start. Grade: B
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Hi TDavid,
I would be grateful for any feedback you might have on Soapbox. My hope is that it provides a ton of value to bloggers. Any feedback I get (especially negative feedback) makes the site better.
My original thinking was that refreshing all of the blogs on a daily basis would be enough. Do you think it should automatically happen more often? The site currently offers a way to manually refresh your blog (there’s a link on the preferences page). Perhaps I should make that link more prominent?
As far as picking up changes later, the mechanism Soapbox uses is pretty simple. When a blog post is imported into Soapbox, the blog “owns” the review. When in this state, any changes to the blog post will overwrite the existing Soapbox review. If you decide to modify the review on Soapbox then Soapbox “owns” the review and future adjustments to the blog post will be ignored. Once Soapbox “owns” the review, you can refresh from the blog post by deleting the Soapbox review.
Hope this helps!
Comment by Duff OMelia — September 7, 2006 @ 4:22 pm PST
Hi Duff, thanks for stopping by. You wrote: “The site currently offers a way to manually refresh your blog (there’s a link on the preferences page). Perhaps I should make that link more prominent?”
Yes, that should be on the outer page without requiring an extra click to “blog preferences.” The size of the button is fine. As mentioned above, I think once a day is fine for the vast majority of sites with reviews and I was kind of being unfair by checking out this functionality with the test above. I’m glad to see you thought this part through. Smart.
There are days this site has more than one review per day, but it’s more like an average of 1-2 reviews per week, so hitting the feed more than once daily wouldn’t make much sense. With the refresh option you’ve covered that and it seems to work pretty well. I just updated with the new information above.
Comment by TDavid — September 7, 2006 @ 4:38 pm PST
Duff - Something else that you will probably need to be concerned about which I didn’t mention above if you haven’t thought of this already is spam. People who will mark stuff as reviews that aren’t reviews of any kind. Hopefully you’ve thought of that to keep your review search engine clean.
Best of luck with your new venture.
Comment by TDavid — September 7, 2006 @ 4:57 pm PST
Hi TDavid, you wrote “Yes, that should be on the outer page without requiring an extra click to “blog preferences.”
I agree with you. I was sick of clicking into preferences to get to the blog subscription details.
I just implemented and deployed this.
Comment by Duff OMelia — September 7, 2006 @ 5:04 pm PST
Hi TDavid, this is some great feedback. I’m really enjoying it.
>> “- full export functionality. I would like the ability at any time to be able to export all reviews imported into Soapbox.”
This is definitely on the to do list and will most certainly be implemented.
>> “- support for starred reviews (1-5) rather than just thumbs up or down, this way we could sort reviews from trusted reviewers as opposed to only positive or negative.”
Well… I’ve thought about this one a whole bunch. I’m curious what you might think of my reasoning behind the thumbs up / thumbs down approach:
http://soapboxit.com/info/differences
I know a number of people have asked for the stars. I’m wondering whether it’s just something they’re used to or whether it provides value. I have mixed feelings about it.
>> “And shouldn’t there at least be a neutral for reviews that are neither positive or negative?”
I’ve thought about that one as well. I’m wondering how much value neutral reviews provide to people. Some have asked for thumbs middle. My original thinking was that I’m interested in hearing about the things you’re a fan of and the things you don’t like. I’m not as interested in the things that you’re not sure if you like or the things that you kind of like. I guess I was looking for a summary of some kind. Would you recommend the thing or not? I’m still mulling on it some.
>> “I wasn’t able to see if Duff thought through the whole adult reviews section of the web and this could prove to be offensive to other Soapboxers if adult reviews start showing up mixed with mainstream.”
I’d like Soapbox to be family friendly.
>> “TOS (is this fixed yet, Duff?)”
Do you mean the Terms of Service? I haven’t seen any errors with that. I’d love to know what server error you saw. It’s just a static page. I would normally get notification if the site has an issue and I haven’t gotten one of those notifications in quite awhile. Is this the url you’re looking for?
http://soapboxit.com/info/terms_and_privacy
>> “haven’t thought of this already is spam”
I haven’t solved that yet. Although now that I think about it, the people that would be spamming would be Soapbox users and I’d be able to talk to them about it. So hopefully it won’t turn into a big issue.
Thanks again TDavid for the feedback! Thank you for taking the time. If there’s anything else, I’d love to talk further.
Comment by Duff OMelia — September 7, 2006 @ 5:21 pm PST
Happy to help somebody that wants to improve their site/service, Duff.
I didn’t take a screenshot of the error when I registered
sorry. Normally I do that with error messages but looking through my screencaps here for some reason I didn’t in this case. I know when it happened though and it was right when I registered and tried to click the link to see what I was agreeing to by checking the box. I thought it was odd timing.
If you are looking for a straight up + (thumbs up) or - (down) vote, then I agree a neutral review is of little use, but I’m looking forward to when someone has 50 or 100 reviews how difficult it would be to rank sort them. If it’s agreed that 5 stars is the best and 0 or 1 star is the worst, that doesn’t make things more complicated. Here I’ve used grades (a,b,c,d, f) because those translate well. A starred system allows ranking and it would be helpful for those who are wondering what Duff’s most favorite and least favorite reviews are. It’s not important for a few reviews but dozens it becomes an organizational tool more than anything. And if the reviewer is already inserting a tag, it’s not that much more work to put in a number (0-5). You could make this an additional/optional field so that the thumbs up/down is still the basic requirement for inclusion and the starred review is optional for those who want to make organization easier.
It’s a reality that we all feel so-so about something and reviews can still be interesting and useful with an overall neutral review score. I’ll give you an example of review here where there was lots of information on both sides and ultimately ended in a grade of C (average) which would equate to a neutral vote, if I could make one on Soapbox: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060823/3696/
I understand your point about wanting passionate reviews, but sometimes the scores are added up in reviews and that’s the way the numbers shake out: up the middle. It doesn’t necessarily mean the review isn’t useful or worthwhile just because it’s neutral/average though. Like any review, it’s the text of the review that’s more important than the actual score — except in the case of ranking and organization.
As for keeping it a family thing, understood, but you might want to go on the early offensive on that one. While you might feel keeping it family friendly is important, others may not agree. Flickr launched with 18+ area. Consider creating adult.soapboxit.com and context filter reviews submitted with adult-related keywords to that and lock it behind some member-only gateway as a means of protection for keeping it family friendly. This way you don’t end up with your family review pool contaminated. We receive some pretty graphic adult comment spam here and if there was no moderation in place, it would be here in minutes. You don’t want that on a family friendly service.
Comment by TDavid — September 7, 2006 @ 5:50 pm PST
>> “I know when it happened though and it was right when I registered and tried to click the link to see what I was agreeing to by checking the box. ”
Ahh haa! That’s the hint I needed! Thanks. I had an obsolete link. All fixed now.
>> “but I’m looking forward to when someone has 50 or 100 reviews how difficult it would be to rank sort them. ”
Man… You’ve definitely got me thinking about it. I was originally feeling pretty confident about the decision to go thumbs up/down. My confidence is waning.
>> “It doesn’t necessarily mean the review isn’t useful or worthwhile just because it’s neutral/average though.”
I’m mulling on this more. You make some good points about it.
>> “This way you don’t end up with your family review pool contaminated.
It’ll be interesting to see how the whole “adult content” stuff works out. Personally, I don’t want Soapbox to be all things to all people. I’d rather leave the adult content reviews to another site.
Comment by Duff OMelia — September 8, 2006 @ 2:15 am PST
I have also enjoyed my discussions with Duff based on my review here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/soapbox-review
I think with great leadership, Soapbox should be a success!
Comment by Allen — September 10, 2006 @ 1:03 pm PST
[…] In fact, had a good conversation recently with Duff, the developer from Soapbox whom I hadn’t known before writing about his new service online. Duff must have been at least a little disappointed to see Microsoft name one of its new services Soapbox. I would have been anyway. […]
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