BView offers £10 Amazon voucher for every 20 reviews

We @ BView ran a competition where the reviewer with the most number of reviews during the April/May period won a trip to Barcelona and £500 in spending cash. It worked well and a competitive streak came out in a lot of our members.

Trouble was we could only have 1 winner so the people that missed out by a couple of reviews lost out a wee bit. So we've decided to trial rewarding every reviewer for every 20 reviews with a £10 voucher. You can roll them up and can earn up to £50/month.

Anyway, read more here.

Google kicks in

Just beginning to see some huge growth in Users of BView off the back of better Google listings producing long tail search results.

We produced a XML site map for launch which was frowned upon by a couple of of SEOs I know. The argument here is that SEO activities are harder to monitor because there is no direct correlation between a page being in the index and effort applied to get it there via internal links while the traffic boost is non-existent.

I think this is subjective as we have been able to monitor how Google is crawling pretty accurately. Now that we have some examples of content hubs and crawl pathways we will try to be a bot more selective in what is returned in results because some of our pages provide a better User experience than others and we want to provide great search results every time via Google as it can only help us.

What is interesting and how much of it to display

When we built BView we thought "hey let's make the site social and tell people what is else is going on" so we built little widgets of content that pull out local people, reviews etc. Of course we were not the first (or the last) however I've come round to thinking that when including content it must either be directly relevant or it should be just a flow of activity.

An example of this is local people. It's nice to show local people but it is nicer is to show people that do things the same as me (based on some kind of relevance rating). Local reviews is good but I want more than that...I want latest reviews in the area, I want who wrote them, I want edits, comments, essentially anything that might spark my interest.

I love what Brightkite has done in this area and I am working on making something better.

Reputation management: the right way and the wrong way

When we launched BView we had assumed that there would be a mass of abusive reviews and/or reviews that the business did not agree with.

It transpires that:

i) people are genuine and should be trusted (which is an area we are building the app out in)
ii) reviews tend to be well written balanced and fair.

That does not mean we haven't had people use the review system in a manner we don't agree with.

Vindictive reviews have featured (you rated my friends business badly therefore I am going to review you badly) while well written reviews of poor experiences get requests for removal. These have been frustrating as we offer the means to address all issues and take the conversation into the open.

My advice to people creating platforms of this ilk: trust the people.

Yelp allows businesses to "fight back"

Techcrunch are cover Yelp's new suite of features that allow businesses to join the conversation which happens around their business. I think this is a great feature and something BView has done since launch.

Allowing the business to join the discussion:

• businesses can respond to reviews
• reviewers and businesses can engage in a conversation around a review
• businesses and reviewers can subscribe to each other to track activity

It seemed like the fair thing to do in order to allow a balanced view where both parties can present their case and allow the reader to decide.

It's not a fight - it's a conversation.

Backpack is great

We've been using Backpack to manage the workflow of design tasks. It's far from the perfect solution but when it's a small team it doesn't need to be as talking makes up for the short fall in task management.

I guess the appeal of backpack is how basic it is. I know two people (inc. myself) who have used it to find, select & buy a house for example.

The RSS feed of changes is useless due to its over granularity but aside from that it gets my vote.

BView comments are cool

My old company Simply Business have been replying to their reviews on BView (well, the bad ones) and have done a great job.

I love this feature.

BView new business owners

I thought I'd shamelessly promote some of the business owners that have controlled their profile on BView:

• Anson McCade
• X & Y Communications
• Xbridge

My thanks to these business owners.

Tracking inbound links and monitoring Google

We have just seen the Google bot start to crawl around the BView domain for the first time. It's path appears to be this blog and the "find me on" links I have added to the RHS nav. It is debatable whether we should have no cache, no crawls against User profiles but that will emerge over time. From my profile the bot moved to another User's profile and a couple of reviewed businesses. 14 pages picked from the domain as of now.

I have been recommended SEOMoz tools that track inbound links and allow monitoring and impact of off line efforts (press etc.) on the inbound concentration.

I think we'll track the domain using this tool rather than the old skool manual process I used to have to employ back in the day.

Going for dinner

Going to Haxted Mill for dinner with friends. I've reviewed them on BView from my last visit. Keen to get the business owner to manage their profile and tell me if the data is accurate.

4 searches where Google is 2nd best

Google is a brilliant search engine and it’s now very infrequent I have to go outside the top 3 links when I am searching for a specific topic or product. There are notable exceptions:

Forum Search
I found BoardReader a few days ago and I have been very impressed by the results. Chat forum search is something I’ve been looking at for ages and wishing for a better way to search them.

Blog Search
OK, Google’s own blog search is useful (principally because the spam is minimised which Technorati is shocking for) but Technorati is still my first choice when searching for blogs due to tag & authority scores. Unfortunately I feel time may soon be up for Technorati.

Business Search
Yahoo and Google have local engines but Yelp have built a great platform. My business, BView, has taken business search in a different direction by i)going for results across the entire spectrum of businesses (not just the 40% that service consumers) and layering in proprietary & public access data.

Google has reviews but BView and Yelp actually allow personal relevance by layering in your personal social fabric while BView has also added the businesses themselves to the social graph.

People Search
A search on Linkedin & Facebook produce results for “normal” people and allow me to get a feel for their friend set. 192.com searches across the electoral register producing a match for me and my wife (indeed, I used this to research the owners of my house prior to buying it). I have seen some nice aggregators emerging and I expect some big things in this area.

I guess these are niche areas which Google may eventually get round to but it highlights some niche areas where I would ignore Google. The same applies to auctions/classifieds where Ebay can get killed in niche areas because of it’s structure and lack of flexibility.