The Praized Media Product Blog

We’ve just released a new version of our plugins for Wordpress.

Praized Community v1.6: (download here)

• We’ve implemented the Questions & Answers features! Now, any community using our Praized community plug-in can have its own Praized Answers service on its Web site.  See it on the Praized blog.
• We’ve also added the ability to select the Questions & Answers section as the default page for your Praized section
• We’ve added user avatar support where appropriate (user profile, comments, etc).
• We’re now supporting Google Maps up to 640×640px (from a previous max of 512×512px).

Praized Tools plugin v1.6: (download here)

• The Praized Tools plugin now comes with a default read-only API key that will link back to the Praized Hub (http://praized.com/) so you can be up and running within seconds. You can now placeblog and link back to Praized.com or your own intall on your blog.

These have been tested to be fully compatible with the latest WordPress release 2.7 as well as WordPress MU.

Hope you like these new features!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to ping us at help AT praized.com.

Praized received a surprise trophy last Thursday at the Boomerang Interactive Awards, one of Canada’s most prestigious interactive awards ceremony. The event was held at TOHU Cité des Arts du Cirque. The Boomerang Interactive Awards have been showcasing the best of Quebec’s interactive communications efforts since 1995.

Katherine Melançon, chairman of the jury, said about this trophy (translated from French):

“We wanted to honor Praized for its qualities but also to showcase a reality of interactive communications that we don’t often see in the Boomerang Awards: the accomplishments of entrepreneurs/developers working in beta mode and/or with open source software who are exploring new opportunities in social media. It’s also meant to underline the important role of coders and the fact that they are very creative”.

The Praized co-founders (Harry, Sylvain and myself) would like to take this opportunity to thank the industry for giving us this award, our dedicated and talented employees who are working hard to create our crazy vision, the many freelancers who’ve contributed to our success, all our users and fans who’ve been using our services, our financial partner CSL Ventures and our directory publishers partners, Yellow Pages Group and Yellow Book Usa.

Thank you all!

Coverage:

Infopresse

Infopresse (bis)

EmergenceWeb

I.never.nu

Pictures:

1) Sebastien holding the trophy like it’s his first born

2) Sebastien and Sylvain (his t-shirt says “Hacking is not a crime”)

3) Sylvain thanking the crowd

Last night, Sylvain Carle, our co-founder and CTO, was presenting the Praized API to Montreal NewTech attendees at Laika.  You can see the video here or here.

Click on the logo below. The 2008 Crunchies is an annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch. This specific award recognizes a company outside the United States. Thanks!

Introducing our latest product release: Praized Answers (answers.praized.com). Praized Answers allows anyone to ask a question about local products and services and broadcast it to a selection of social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, Friendfeed and Ping.fm). Broadcasted questions are accompanied by a short form przd.com URL to allow social media friends to answer questions in a central place (see: http://twitter.com/sebprovencher/status/1015634286).

Once they’ve clicked on the link (see: http://przd.com/q/wEg-TQ0xz), friends can use our answering tools to suggest places (via a search in our North American place database that includes more 17M+ businesses) and add a comment to the recommendation. Once suggestions have been made through our answering tool, the user can then decide which business(es) they’re going to contact or visit. After contacting/visiting a merchant, they can vote and comment on their experience using the Praized social tools.

The idea for Praized Answers came to us when we were thinking of the original consumer behavior model, i.e. “the process and activities people engage in when searching for, selecting, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services so as to satisfy their needs and desires” (source: Wikipedia). One of the key sources of business referrals for small merchants is word of mouth. With the rise of social media, it’s becoming easier to ask your online friends for recommendations and Praized Answers helps consumers assemble all of them in one central place.

If you look at Local 2.0 sites today, most of them are focused on merchant reviews. As reviewing is at the end of the purchase process, we feel that most of these sites miss out on the first (and most important) step in consumer behavior: the trusted referral.

Praized Answers is built on the Praized platform, a free white-label local social networking platform. Our platform (available through our API at www.praizedmedia.com) comes with all of the North American business listings you’d expect to find in business directories along with social tools like voting, commenting, tagging and sharing.

It could be that you’re stuck at an airport and need to know where you can find a place to lie your head for the night. Maybe you’re looking for a new watering hole where nobody knows your name or perhaps you need to find a vase to replace the one that your kids broke with a hockey stick while they were playing indoors against mom’s wishes.

We’ve got you covered with Praized Answers.

Praized Answers is a way for you to submit a question about local stuff and harness the power of community to find the answers you are looking for. Simply use the helpful search form to ask a structured question or go solo and use a blank box to phrase your question as you wish.

As soon as you ask your question, it gets published to Praized’s Local Buzz newsfeed, our home page. You can also select other social media services to broadcast your questions (currently Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, Friendfeed and Ping.fm). Choose how you wish to be notified of responses (email, Twitter, RSS).

Oh, but Praized Answers isn’t all about take, take, take. We encourage you to use Praized Answers to lend a hand by sharing your knowledge. When you see a question that you are obviously knowledgeable on, please post an answer and help a Praizer out. You can use our search tool to identify the perfect recommended merchant for your friends. They’ll love you for it!

Find it at answers.praized.com

We’d love to hear your feedback on our latest feature so please send your comments to help@praizedmedia.com or visit us on Get Satisfatction.

Every tribe needs some tribal markings and the Praized Tribe is no different.

Give your WordPress blog some facepaint by downloading the new “WordPraized” WordPress theme which matches the Praized.com interface and compliments our local search plugins (not mandatory).

The WordPraized theme comes bundled with 10 color schemes, support for iPhone and French localization is included. By using the Praized WordPress plugin with the WordPraized template, you are able to create a site that harnesses the power of ‘local search in a box’.

You can get it fresh from the WordPress Themes Directory, grab it from the Downloads section of our Google Code Resources site or find an SVN checked at http://praized.googlecode.com/svn/

Check out a screen shot here.

We’d love to hear your feedback either at via our Help Desk (help@praizedmedia.com) or via our Get Satisfaction page

We’re very “location-aware” people here at Praized. We love it when people are able to find new spots, share their experiences and help their tribes to find out more about their neighborhoods and travel spots. (Who knows how many cases of Montezuma’s revenge we’ve helped to prevent through the power of the little voting arrow!)

Not happy to let you do just any old regular search for locations, we’ve added a tab for ‘Advanced Search Features’ to allow you to get even more precise and detailed. This will help you to be able to better locate all of those out of sight, out of mind places around your home or office that are but a few steps away from you

The 4 ways you can get a bit more specific on what you’re looking for are to :

• enter your address, zip or postal code
• enter your latitude / longitude
• be global and search for locations around your city, state or province
• add a distance criteria

We’re so happy to announce that the two Praized Plugins (Praized Community & Praized Tools) have been added to the Wordpress Plugin Directory and join over 3000 plugins available to the WordPress community.

The Praized Community plugin allows you to deploy a complete local search section including over 17 million North American place listings, social tools and search functionality within your WordPress blog.

The Praized Tools plugin enables new editorial tools within your WordPress installation to allow users to blog about places and link this back to your Praized-powered community.

This announcement comes in advance of Praized’s attendance at WordCamp Toronto 2008 this October 4th-5th at the Progress Campus Student Centre. WordCamp is defined as “A group of WordPress and blogging enthusiasts committed to putting on a fabulous weekend of learning, meeting and exploring all things WordPress and blogging.” Speakers include:

Matt Mullenweg - founder of WordPress
Joseph Thornley - CEO of Thornley Fallis
Tim Shore- Founder and Publisher of Freshdaily
Mark McKay - Videoblogger and host of “Happy Hour with Mark McKay”
Jonathan Dekel - Nightlife Magazine

We’re really looking forward to spending the weekend learning more from WordPress masters, showing our WordPress plugins and adding more members to the Praized Tribe.

You’ve seen from the previous post how our fearless VP of Product Development, Seb Provencher uses Praized Tools to lifehack his blogging efforts by posting location information directly in his blogposts without having to leave the comfortable “WordPress zone”.

This post will look at how Seb uses Praized Tools to embed location information about companies he is blogging about.

In this example, Seb gives his recap of venerable tech journalist Walter Mossberg’s review of the much awaited G1 phone.

Note from the photo above how Seb has embedded Praized links to their location of the head offices of the 2 companies (Google and Apple) he mentions in this post, allowing for the reader to see who in the Praized Tribe has Praized, Raized, favourited or commented on these locations. Rather than using boring, old links to these companies, Seb is social and encouraing his community to share their thoughts on these locations.

Secondly, at the footer of Seb’s blog post, you’ll find the extended entry box showing the full details of the 2 companies mentioned in his post as a quick glance at the information which exists for them in the Praized system.

All in all, Seb is working the Praized Tools to effectively and efficiently provide more information to his readers. Nobody likes a “drive by blogger”, throwing links out there without providing a context or an ability for readers to interact with.