Introducing SpeakerRate

This post originally appeared on Pointless Corp.

Over the past few months — even before we formalized the concept of Pointless Corp.—we’ve been working here-and-there on a project called SpeakerRate. SpeakerRate is a community site for event speakers, attendees, and organizers. We’ve been all three of these at one point or another, and we felt that a site like SpeakerRate would be helpful for each role.

At SpeakerRate:

• Event speakers can get valuable constructive feedback directly from attendees and find out how they can improve their content and delivery for their next talk. They can also establish a SpeakerRating, which will help them earn future speaking opportunities.
• Event attendees can provide constructive feedback to speakers, track the talks they’ve attended, and research upcoming talks that they might attend.
• Event organizers can find speakers, learn about talks they’ve given in the past, and determine who would be a good match for the event they’re organizing.

We’ve used it for a few weeks at Viget while we worked out the kinks, loading in some 2008 event data and and a few ratings. One of the things I like about the concept is that it’s a community site that was immediately useful, even with a very small number of users. If it grows and more people are active, great — the value builds over time. But, unlike a lot of web start-ups, it doesn’t have the same “cold start” problem that many community sites have.

As of today, we’ve opened it up to a small group for more feedback and tire-kicking. If you’d like to check it out early, submit your email and we just might invite you in. Either way, expect to launch publicly in the next few weeks. Thanks for checking it out.