A few months ago, I decided to check out a new service called scribnia; which allows people to rate, review and discover bloggers and online writers. The service was recommended to me by my friend David Spinks, who is scribnia’s community manager. This is not a full review of the service, but rather a brief snapshot of my experience with it.
Scribnia.com
I’m always on the look out for great writers with something new to say, but find that the same old names pop up again and again on social bookmarking sites and Google. This makes it harder than it should be, to discover new writers and sites in your niche that are worth reading. After all, some of the best new writers have pretty poor SEO and some of the most optimised sites are generic when it comes to content.
This is why I decided to take a look at scribnia.com. Scribnia allows you to pick a category and then check out reviews for writers in that niche – potentially a very useful short-cut. You can see who is writing the reviews and decide how biased or otherwise they may be, again, very useful. Also, once you have reviewed 5 writers, scribnia will start suggesting new writers to you; based on the ratings and reviews you have written. This is my page on scribnia.
If you enjoy the reward element of services like foursquare.com, you will find the badges that reviewers can earn on scribnia interesting. Badges can be earned for things like the number of reviews you write, the number of people who give a thumbs-up to your reviews etc. An interesting feature here, is that you can earn a pro-critic badge, after you have written 100 reviews. If scribnia gains enough traction, I can see this pro-critic idea as being really useful for people, who write reviews for a living or who give reviews as a part of their work.
Scribnia, chickens and eggs
Obviously, a service like scribnia relies on numbers in order to fly. After all, people will only write reviews if they believe others will see those reviews. This creates a chicken and egg situation, which is why I decided to write this brief post about the service when David told me about it. Currently, there are just over 35,000 writers added to the site and there are almost 6,500 users. The number of users will need to increase, for the service to achieve it’s potential. However, having used the service and really enjoyed it, I believe the potential is huge.
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