The cool thing about StepRep is, you’re just sitting there minding your own business, not thinkin’ about nothin’ – maybe you’re passing the time drawing pictures of monkeys – and an alert pops up in your inbox to tell you that someone out there in cyberland is chattering about you.
Of course, we’re using StepRep to monitor StepRep’s reputation. Which is how we found out that the French technology website L’Atelier had written a story about our beta release.
My French is pretty mal, but from what I can tell the tone is positive. The author expresses a little skepticism in the final paragraph, where he questions the usefulness of the StepRep widget. Seeing only good reviews on a site, he writes, is normal, and it doesn’t inspire the consumer with confidence. One can always use a search engine to seek out other views.
That’s true, of course. The benefit of the StepRep widget is that it allows you to broadcast positive reviews to multiple locations (to your blog, to your website, and soon to your profiles on various social networking sites) with a single click of a button. Rather than merely copy-and-pasting a review into your website from some other source, it provides a link directly to that source, so that the visitor can confirm its authenticity. And by driving search spiders to the stories you select, it will influence search results so that the favourable stories are more likely to rise to the top.
Anyway, it’s nice to be getting a little attention from our European cousins. À bientôt, mes amis français!
