This is a guest post from David Spinks.

David is the Community Manager for Scribnia.  With a passion for the power of social web communities, he has utilized his knowledge of community building to establish a professional career in the social media field.

He authors a blog at www.davidspinks.com and contributes to the Scribnia Blog.

Watching Scribnia develop into a strong and loyal community has been very exciting.

We’ve enjoyed the loyal activity of some very enthusiastic alpha users who have contributed a lot of quality reviews and have been able to find new bloggers in their industries.

I’d like to share with you where we plan on going with Scribnia and how I will play a role as community manager.

We’re looking to continue to develop Scribnia as a valuable tool for bloggers and their communities. By giving the power to the readers, our goal is to really “level the playing field.” So much focus is placed on Google Pagerank and Alexa rankings. This makes it very hard for the “little guy” to gain their due recognition.

As many bloggers know, there are so many awesome blogs out there that you rarely hear about unless they pull in loads of links and visitors.

Through Scribnia, we hope that the blogging and online reading communities can really share those blogs that are truly great.

We’d like to continuously refine our discovery engine in order to provide the best possible, personalized recommendations. This is a tough task but one that we’re very committed to. There are a lot of recommendation engines out there but we’re aiming to differentiate ourselves by using author reviews rather than blog reviews, and really taking into account each user’s personal preferences. We take into account a lot more than “similar content”.

I have a number of roles as Community Manager.

My main role is to bring in users and to get people excited about Scribnia.  So far, this hasn’t been a difficult task as bloggers seem to really appreciate the service.  It’s a benefit for bloggers to get involved early. The more reviews you have the greater chance you have of being featured as a top blogger, or being chosen as an “Author of the Day”.

We are planning on going public (beta) very soon and hope that our community members will help us get others excited about Scribnia.

The community aspect of Scribnia is one that we’re proud of, and we hope that others will want to be a part of that community.  I will be online pretty much all day everyday talking with users, answering any questions, and staying active on the site. If you know me, you know I love conversation! As Community Manager, I have a lot on my plate, but I’m very excited to help the community grow and to connect with our members.

If you’d like to join Scribnia while we’re in alpha, you can email me any time at DavidSpinks@Scribnia.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at @Scribnia.

The Future of Scribnia originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

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.

Better Blogging and Community Spirit with Scribnia originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

This integration and interaction is especially true for bloggers, when you want to connect with other bloggers as well as the community that you’ve built around your own blog.

So, in no particular order, I thought I’d share some tools that might help you (as bloggers) connect more. Feel free to use or abuse.

BackType. It’s no secret that I’ve been a huge fan of BackType since its launch. Allowing you to follow the conversations from anywhere you’ve ever left a comment online, it also allows you to see what the people you’re interested in are saying, and where.

Now, with their new Connect option, they’ve just taken it to a whole new level.

You can see comments from other blog’s about you; how many times your post has been referenced on Twitter, Reddit, Digg, etc; and allows you to see the other conversations that your blog commentators are having. Here’s an example of it in use on this blog (just scroll up a little and you’ll see the info just above the trackback link).

I can see a lot of potential in this addition to BackType’s services and if it helps promote more blogs and conversations into the bargain, that’s got to be a good thing. (If you’re on BackType, you can connect with me here).

Scribnia. This is a pretty new service and one that has just gone into private alpha, so you need an invitation (you can email them for one). What I really like about Scribnia is the idea behind it.

Basically, Scribnia will be an online resource that rates and reviews bloggers, journalists, reporters and more. Using a metric system based on context ratings and mini-reviews that Scribnia members provide, you can soon see who’s worth reading in your areas of interest.

I’m testing it out at the minute and so far it looks a really useful way to sort out the stuff that you really want to read. Think of it as your personal feed recommendation engine. (If you’re on Scribnia, you can connect with me here – note, you  need to be logged in).

MyBlogLog. If you blog and have a Yahoo account, then MyBlog Log is something you should definitely check out. Almost like one huge online community, MyBlogLog has a ton of features that bring bloggers and readers together.

Every time you visit a MyBlogLog-enabled site, your details are remembered. You can then choose to become a member of that blog’s community (see the sidebar plugin on this blog), connect with the blog author, or see other like-minded readers and connect with them.

You can also display all your online identities, so anyone using MyBlogLog can connect with you there as well. The only real downside is that you need a Yahoo account so it may not be for everyone. (If you’re on MyBlogLog, you can connect with me here).

These are just three tools that offer bloggers a great way to connect. There are a few more, and I’ll be looking at some of these in a future post.

How about you? Do you use any of these services? If so, what do you think about them? Or are there others that you’d recommend?

Connecting the Dots originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.