Also newly available is a Scribnia widget, which bloggers can add to their blog, showcasing their Scribnia ranking and encouraging readers to rate the blogger. By encouraging new reviews, installing the widget helps to increase a blogger’s rank on Scribnia, which in turn drives more traffic to the bloggers’ site. This makes the widget a win-win for the blogger and Scribnia.
Scribnia is announcing its move into beta mode, making the site available to the public for the first time after gathering thousands of reviews from an invitation-only community of readers and authors.
Mashable (http://mashable.com/) editor Ben Parr commented, “Scribnia is surprisingly detailed in its assessment of writers. It doesn’t take long to write a review, but once that information is aggregated, it provides for a pretty spiffy and hopefully accurate assessment of a person’s focus and talents.”
Scribnia’s recommendation engine uses a data-driven approach to help users find new bloggers and columnists. The engine uses the site’s “Context Ratings,” which are metrics specific to each author’s subject matter. So, for example, political columnists are assessed on whether they are liberal or conservative, and technology bloggers are rated on whether they cater to the cutting-edge or mainstream.
Scribnia co-founder Russell D’Souza explains, “Our recommendation algorithm gives users some very powerful features. After a user has rated six authors we suggest new authors that match the user’s personal tastes. The user can check out author’s content on Scribnia, and based on their responses we further refine their recommendations. We also have a ‘similar authors’ feature that works similarly to Amazon’s similar products feature.”
In addition to its features for users, Scribnia offers bloggers and columnists a new way to interact with their readers. Authors can receive honest feedback from users and respond to user suggestions. For bloggers who are well-regarded on Scribnia, Scribnia provides a new way to promote themselves. “It’s important that author ratings reside in an impartial location, rather than on blogger’s own site,” explains D’Souza.
Social media blogger Danny Brown (http://dannybrown.me) wrote, "...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."
According to co-founder Jack Groetzinger, “Scribnia aims to be the go-to resource for people’s opinions about online authors. We want to revolutionize the way people find new authors to read online.”
Scribnia is a participant in the DreamIt Ventures (http://www.dreamitventures.com/) accelerator program. DreamIt Ventures is one of several technology incubators embracing a new model of funding startups. The Scribnia team is spending the summer at DreamIt’s Philadelphia offices, working alongside nine other startups.
Early response from bloggers and users has been highly positive.