A friend of mine, Duff, has started a new site for posting and sharing reviews of anything, called Soapbox. It’s a very slick site built by one person (with the help of a designer that I’ve also worked with, Rich at Samedis Design). The basic idea is that you can write reviews and build a network of people whose reviews you care about.
One interesting aspect of the site is its attempt to make the service useful to bloggers. One problem I have with social networking sites is that I already have enough places to write about things. I have this blog, my link blog, and my Vox blog. There’s also del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.fm, comments on blogs that I read, the mailing list I share with my college friends, all of the message boards I’m registered for, and probably a bunch more sites that I’m forgetting.
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 think that’s a pretty clever approach. If you already have a blog, you can participate on Soapbox without reposting all of your reviews over there.
If you want to read more behind the scenes stuff from Soapbox, check out Duff’s blog.
September 6, 2006 at 10:31 am
That’s very slick. The blog integration is the key element here. That will bring a lot of new people to the site, but the idea itself I can’t see not taking off.
September 9, 2006 at 4:12 pm
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 r…
September 10, 2006 at 2:02 pm
I also like the idea of pulling reviews from other’s blogs. Its a review aggregator 🙂
I posted a review here: http://www.centernetworks.com/soapbox-review