BuzzShout, which went live yesterday, is a collaborative review site for new web companies. Some people are going to think this is useless, and a few will have a ton of fun with it. If you have something to say to or about a web 2.0 company, this is the place to do it.
Anyone can suggest a new company (and there are a few already). The process includes stating the company name and URL, uploading a logo, writing a description and adding tags to describe the company and its industry. Submissions go through a moderator before being posted.
Once a company is included in BuzzShout, any member can review it. A review consists of a 1-5 star rating and some free content. .
Companies can be sorted by tags, “shouts” or ratings. RSS feeds are available for everything. Overall, the service is pretty buttoned up.
It’s an intelligent way to take audience commentary and aggregate it in a tangible way through rankings, etc. On the downside, it is easily gamed, particularly until a very large audience is established to drown out the employees touting their own service, or competitors trashing it.
Steve Rubel thinks it’s a good idea too. Let’s all check back in a month and see what the content looks like.
Random thought: I think it’s interesting that James Yu, the creator, did not include BuzzShot as a company that can be reviewed on BuzzShot. I’m sure we’ll see it soon.
very hot!
Michael, wouldn’t this be a solution to your dilemma of covering all of Web 2.0 or selectively picking the “best” ? When you posed this question on TechCrunch ( it was more about getting overwhelmed by email..etc) I basically proposed a two-stage strategy:
1 - Open TechCrunch - anyone can enter new companies, they get “digged”
2 - Editorial TechCrunch - you pick the most-dugg entries and elevate it to the level of editorial review.
Sounds to me like BuzzShot is doing #1
BuzzShot Guys, I hope you soon realize you badly search!
No search? Did I miss something?
Zoli, Yeah, this is actually very similar to something I was kicking around for TechCrunch.
So it’s a http://www.web2list.com clone?
Hm, I don’t wanna dominate this discussion… but I’ve just reviewed Zvents there and had a surprise discovery: the “shout” (digg) is not for the company,but for the reviewer (?). That makes sense, too, but then there is no way to get the most populat companies (the star rating won’t suffice for this).
Zoli, are you sure? While I was writing the review the “shout” functionality went down completely and I wasn’t able to use it again.
If you are right, that’s not the right functionality. It should be for the company so that we can find the highest rated companies, as you said.
Ok, yeah, Zoli you are right. I’ll update the post. I think having a rating system for each review makes sense (Digg now does this for each comments - thumbs up or down) to help weed out the obvious bad stuff, but it’s more important to have an overall vote for each company.
What is the business model? Or perhaps its being run as a charity?
So this is basically a web2.0 application catalogue website instead of the many many web2.0 catalogue blog posts and lists that exist. I’m not convinced at all. This is clearly a short term traffic play.
Suppose I have a great idea for a web 2.0 application and I manage to build it in my spare time. But I don’t have enough money to promote it.
If BuzzShout manages to gather a community that supports great web 2.0 applications and that community diggs my application, a few promotion problems will wash away. It could be a launch pad for my application :> .
One more thing. BuzzShout will be (hopefully) a great place to get reviews for web 2.0 applications, reviews written by people who understand what web2.0 is all about.
This is all we need…more “web 2.0″ ideas.
**Comment by Michael Arrington**
Zoli, Yeah, this is actually very similar to something I was kicking around for TechCrunch.
Mike,
I am doing some research on various systems and digg.com is one of them. I could probably donate the code to Techcrunch with the basic functionality of a Digg.com that would be customized for a tech type review site. Let me know if you are interested.
http://Supr.c.ilio.us is more fun, certainly. More specific as well, devoted to social bookmarking. It’s a pity it requires registration. I appreciate their
tagline: Social social tagging site tagging. Also check the ever-changing mottos in their blog as “It might be crap but at least it validates.” Enjoy!
I could use a review of Web 2.0 hosting providers. There are so many out there that wading through the pack is mind numbing for a new startup that requires dedicated servers.
I wanted to review BuzzShout on thier own site but alas was unable to. Helpful site for entreprenuers, though.
its pretty awesome. spend some hours over there, damn
Best of Web 2.0 sites ranked by actual users. Drag & drop sites to desired spot in the list and submit rankings. Overall rankings reflect cumulative average of all user submissions. Recommend a new site as well..
Here’s the url: http://www.koolweb2.com