Last night I attended Case Camp, a rapid-fire series of 10 minute marketing case studies. I gave an 11 minute talk about blogger relations outreach with regards to Bolloxed. I could have talked about bigger software projects along similar lines, but who wants to hear about software all the time?
I was talking, in part, about getting bloggers to write previews of your stuff. In my presentation, I was heard to utter this aphorism:
You can lead a horse to water, but, uh, you can’t control whether or not that horse gives the water a positive review.
JFK, eat your heart out.
Anyhow, we had to leave early, but I did manage to catch John Ounpuu’s review of Sutori by Blast Radius. It’s still in beta, but it’s a pretty groovy looking consumer opinion aggregator. I especially like the goodwill meter (mind you, it’s actually a goodwill/badwill meter). John also showed this great scatter-graph Ajaxy thingy that maps companies’ goodwill on a large graph, but I can’t find that on the site at the moment.
I uploaded a couple of stories I’d previously posted on my blog:
DarrenBarefoot.com 
The list of stories didn’t show up in the RSS feed. Too bad, because if it did, Sutori would get the search engine juice from the people that syndicate you. That said, I don’t think it’s supposed to appear in blog posts, but rather to have it on your sidebar. I signed up and there’s no way to include the code via PHP (which would add real links to the individual articles, which would help with search-engine ranking). That said, there are RSS feeds for tags, though it doesn’t look like there’s a feed per company or per geographical area.
I’m sure that’s easy to do, though I can see how they might integrate with something like 43 Places, which sort of does the same thing Sutori does but for, well, places. Also, stealing the idea from Flickr/43 Place etc. would be the ability to post a story from Sutori to your blog, linking directly back to the Sutori story, of course.
And an API. 🙂 They seem to get a bunch of things right, so this doesn’t feel like stuff they haven’t at least thought of.
Thanks for the post Darren. And the stories, too. The sexy scatter-graph in my slides was actually a sneak peak at something that’s still in development but should be live next week. I couldn’t resist showing it off early.
And Richard, I can tell you that enabling people to post stories directly from their blog and opening up an API are both things we’ve thought of and added to our development roadmap.
Imagine my surprise when I heard your aphorism (hey, I learned a new word today) repeated by a colleague Thursday in place of the original, old school version. 🙂
http://www.jankarlsbjerg.com/blog/archives/2006/09/28/hey-you-read-darren-barefoot/
My favourite horse aphorism:
You can lead a horse to water, and you can’t make it drink, but you can drown it.