Praized

Below is an overview of how the Praized platform works. You can also watch our screencast on the home page and visit the sections in our site that are dedicated to publishers and advertisers.

Community-centered

The Praized platform is like local search in a box. It comes pre-loaded with over 17 million US and Canadian local business listings, complete with contact info and location maps. You get social features like friends, favorites, voting, sharing, user-generated tagging, and commenting. In sum, the Praized platform allows you to aggregate and organize local conversations within your community. And best of all, it’s free!

Praized takes a distributed approach with its platform. Instead of being one centralized portal, Praized is a network of individual communities that we call tribes. Publishers can quickly and easily integrate our free Praized platform within their existing blog by using our Wordpress and Movable Type plug-ins or in any other social media site using our API.

Place ratings and comments are specific to the community of each site where Praized is installed. Since each tribe has unique tastes, the favorites will vary from one community to another. So the top-ranked restaurants on a vegan site will be different than the ones on a meat-lovers’ site because the two groups have fundamentally different tastes. An aggregated view of all communities is available at Praized.com.

Publishers retain control over the space in their site’s sidebars and header, which means that they can use the ad serving solution of their choice and retain all revenues from those ads. Praized’s business model is to sell unobtrusive contextual ads inside merchant profile pages and in results pages, in collaboration with existing local ad network partners.

User-driven

A publisher’s tribe can search among more than 17 million North American business listings already in our database, or add new listings for any city in the world. Each of the listings has a place profile page with contact info and a map. Each listing starts with one or more default tags. As users add additional descriptive tags, the merchant profile gains added context and color.

We rank search results based solely on the highest collective rating within each tribe. Rankings are never affected by paid advertisements or sponsorship.

Users (aka Praizers) have access to a variety of social tools to vote, comment, tag, bookmark and share their favorite places

Each Praizer’s profile has quick links to their info for that particular community. You’ll easily see their favorite places, the ones they voted and commented on and the list of their Praized friends. Praizers can access all the details from their various communities at Praized.com.

Editorially-focused

Offer a new local search feature to all your readers, accessible via a new local section in your Web site, a search box and a widget.

Blog/write about local places by embedding snippets of Praized place information (merchant name, contact information, vote results) in your editorial content. Keep traffic within your own web site when you refer to a specific place.

Engage your readers locally.

Monitor all comments through our moderation tool to create new editorial content.

Ready to get started? Join now!

The best way to learn more about the Praized platform is by using it, so you’re welcome to sign up for a free user account and/or download our platform any time. The more Praizers out there, the more people will be able to discover the best local places and merchants within their trusted communities.