Is Wine Too Niche For Web 2.0?
By Tim on Oct 13, 2006 in Articles, Wine 2.0
As a wine blogger and online marketer, I have been watching “Web 2.0” for some time. While others have been skeptical of some of these offerings, I have been fairly optimistic that someone would come up with a site that would come part of my daily life.
As I mentioned here earlier I had high hopes for Wine Life Today, but this site seems to be at the very same place it was when I reviewed it; not enough visitors to submit and/or rate stories to make this as indispensable as digg.com is for technology news. I’ve tried Cork’d and just looked at Bottlenotes but don’t see either of them to be compelling until they have a way for me to easily tag posts here that automatically populate my accounts on their sites (preferably in the form of a Wordpress plugin). Even the newly rebooted Netscape site has not attracted critical mass to get more than a handful of votes for food and wine related news. So is wine too niche for Web 2.0?
Perhaps, but I also think it’s probably too early to know how any of this will turn out. Yes, the wine industry is very traditional with the bulk of wineries just now grappling with integrating the internet into their traditional sales and marketing approach. But there are glimmers of hope out there that perhaps the future is closer than I think.
Case in point is an invitation to a web 2.0 event in San Francisco in a few weeks cleverly called, “Wine 2.0“. A collection of wineries, technology companies, venture capitalists, and, yes, wine bloggers will meet. Even though it’s 2,000 miles away from my home and will cost me out of my pocket to attend, I’m seriously considering going to be on the ground floor in this space.
Another data point is a new wine blog aggregator now in preview called Vinolin. They take the simple aggregation of wine blogs one step further by adding a tagging component. None of this is enough to get super excited about right now but in a few months there will be a central repository of knowledge about wine that will be very compelling; in a year or two this could compete favorably with some of the traditional wine press. Think of it as the Technorati of wine blogs. So, of all the sites I’ve seen, this one will become a part of my daily routine.
Perhaps wine isn’t too niche for web 2.0 after-all. What do you think?
