RateItAll Launches Industry's First Consumer Review Widget

July 19, 2007; 04:24 AM
Online consumer rating community RateItAll, Inc. today announced the public beta launch of an interactive consumer rating and review widget. The Flash-based widget allows blog and website publishers to effortlessly add full featured consumer rating and social media functionality to their sites at no cost.

The consumer review widget allows users to 1) post ratings and reviews; 2) browse thumbnail photos of recent reviewers; 3) browse the ratings and reviews of others; and 4) join RateItAll's distributed rating network - all within the body of the widget, and without ever having to leave the host site.

This widget is ideal for bloggers as a means to build community and to solicit feedback from their readership. Blog reviews posted via the blog feedback badge are simultaneously posted on RateItAll.com, promoting the blog to RateItAll's large user base.

"This widget represents a significant leap forward in distributed web applications," said RateItAll founder Lawrence Coburn. "As far as we can tell, this is the first fully read/write widget on the Web."

Besides the benefits of building community and gaining reader feedback, blog publishers can also drive traffic from RateItAll's large destination site community. Blogs receiving the most ratings via the consumer review widget appear within a "Hottest Blog" module, updated hourly, that appears on numerous pages of RateItAll.com.

"I suspect that this widget's ability to drive traffic from RateItAll's large user base will be a big draw for blog publishers," said Coburn. "Growing a blog's readership is a big task - why not give your blog's community the tools to help promote it for you?"

RateItAll's blog feedback widget works in parallel with RateItAll's interactive blog directory. Adding a feedback badge to your blog automatically includes your blog in RateItAll's blog directory, providing additional exposure. Top rated blogs appear first in the directory, allowing readers to quickly and easily locate high quality blogs.

"We expect blog feedback badges to be just the first step as we enable distributed consumer rating," said Coburn. "We think that the concept holds a lot of promise for verticals such as local business reveiws, politician reviews, and celebrity reviews as well."

Blog publishers may click through to build their own blog feedback widget.

About RateItAll

Based in San Francisco and ranked among the 3,000 busiest US websites, RateItAll is a distributed consumer rating community where visitors can find and share opinions on virtually any topic. All of the site's content is available for syndication via widgets, and RateItAll members share in the advertising revenue associated with their reviews. RateItAll's mission is to power the distributed exchange of the world's opinions.