scribnia

A little while back, I shared some tools with you that I thought helped enhance the community spirit for bloggers.? One of those tools was Scribnia, which I described as your “personal feed recommendation”. Having sat down with it a little more since then, it’s clear that it’s a lot more than that.

At its simplest, Scribnia allows members to find blogs and authors and rate them. So far, so what? After all, BlogCatalog offers the same feature with their star rating system.

This is where Scribnia separates itself from much of the pack, by using “contextual ratings”. Instead of just rating a blog between one and five stars, you have three slide bars to choose from: the contextual ratings system. The context of the blog defines what rating descriptions you can use.

For example, if you were to review my blog on Scribnia, the contextual ratings you’d be offered are Technology, Approach and Radicalness:

• Technology – are my posts on marketing targeting e-marketing or print and billboard campaigns and companies
• Approach – do I tend to offer more low budget or high budget solutions
• Radicalness – are my views mainstream or radical

You then use a slider for each one and offer the higher score to the rating that suits me best for each context. It’s a novel way of letting other readers know at a glance what a blogger or author’s writing style is like. So far, people see me as more e-marketing, lower budget and a bit of a radical – I can live with that!

But as cool as their contextual ratings system is, Scribnia is really about building transparency, trust and community for bloggers and authors, by offering honest reviews. You’ll also find some great new writers and blogs you may have missed – something I’m all for.

Once you register for an account at Scribnia, you can either add your own blog or browse the authors and publications that are already on the site. To make it easier, you can browse by categories or niches. Then you can start reviewing your favourite bloggers and give them a wider audience.

What’s really cool about Scribnia is that you can actually add your favourite bloggers if they’re not already there. Simply fill out the details needed in the Add an Author section, hit submit and that blogger you feel deserves a wider audience is there in front of Scribnia’s members.

Another nice feature once you’re on your Scribnia homepage is the Suggested Users to Follow box.

As the term suggests, this shows you other Scribnia members that have similar tastes to you. Normally these kind of things are just token little add-ons to fill out your admin area.

With Scribnia, however, it does seem to work pretty well.

The system recommeded members to me whose favourite authors were Chris Brogan and Jennifer Schaeffer – two people I read quite a bit.

So far, I have to say that I’m impressed with Scribnia.

It’s bringing new bloggers to a wider audience; its rating system is encouraging you to write to a higher level each time; and it really does foster a sense of blogging community.

What more could you want? How about trying it yourself to see?

For tonight and tomorrow only, the good folks at Scribnia have opened up the Alpha site for readers of this blog. All you need to do is create your account and then when it asks for the Alpha password, type in “dannybrown” without the quotation marks.

You can then use the site’s features or write a review. Feel free to add your review of this blog – or just drop by and say hello. You’ll find me right here.

Note: This review of Scribnia is not an endorsement. I mentioned to David Spinks (the community manager at Scribnia) that I was writing a follow-up post to my initial mini-review and he kindly arranged the alpha pass for my readers.