Praized: Integrated Local Reviews

Local web resources such as Yelp have become standards for local searches and directory assistance, but as interactive as such a webservice is, it falls short on integration. Cue the music for Praized, the Canadian network that has bridged the gap between publisher and local directory.

To start with, Praized is a voting and recommendation platform, allowing users and publishers to generate a community based listing of what their favorite places and services are. Vote for your favorite coffee place, comment on your dry cleaner, or mark your favorite dog park in the area with a structured, tagged, and intuitive interface. Certainly nothing new there, but what Praized also does is utilize groups within the community (they call them “tribes”) to add strength to the reviews and recommendations. Since many of these “tribes” center around bloggers familiar to the local area, recommendations are no longer faces in a crowd - they’re people you trust. Say you’re looking for ice cream, but know that the only voice you trust for food recommendations is a local blogger. Join in on their Praized plugin and before long that “tribe” is giving you reviews based on the opinions of like-minded people.

For the publishers, Praized integrates directly into blogging platforms, adding a page or a portion of a page of their content. Publishers wanting to increase their content will like how Praized’s embedded snippets are customizable by color and size, and easy to drop in code that you can place anywhere on your site. As an incentive for publishers, incremental ad revenue is generated from contextual ads. When the user clicks an entry they like, say a local ice cream parlor, a Google map mashup, and relevant ads are generated (ads absent from below screenshot).

For advertisers Praized offers the opportunity to target local markets while partnering with an authorative voice in that market. As an example, MocoLoco, a modern design blog that has integrated Praized, lends credibility to advertisements from their site. When visitors come to their blog, they are more likely to approach links on the page with the same trust as the blog, giving advertisements on the site credibility they would not see from a search engine or random placement. Naturally, advertisers that are offering products or services not linked to local destinations will not see a benefit for this, but advertisers that can target local markets will find Praized a developing opportunity.

If there is a drawback to Praized, it may be the newness of it. Even though there is greater integration into local sources of information (read bloggers), Praized is offering a reinvented wheel. Sites such as Yelp and Chowhound are already established, and where they are not integrated into the blogosphere, it is difficult to ignore their databases and the substantial input they have had from their visitors. There is also the question whether integrations such as Praized will frustrate visitors, who may come to see the content the same way that they see the ubiquitous Google ads. Praized can be found with the Listio search, local+vote.

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Tags: blog tools, comment, embed, local, rate, recommend, reviews, search, vote
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