I’m astonished at how much has changed in the past two years.  One particularly conspicuous example is twitter use in and around Vinisud, a big wine fair that happens every two years. Twitter at Vinisud Two years ago, there were a handful of people tweeting at Vinisud.  I actually got multiple journalists to visit the [...]

A lot of you probably don’t know this, but my internet handle is mroconnell.  Like Mister O’Connell.  This is an old nickname that goes back to when I was a teenager.  A lot of my friends teased me for acting like an 80 year old man so often.  I had business meetings, taxes, crazy stories [...]

I want to change the way winemakers think about participation in social media. I want them to stop treating twitter and facebook like some alien ritual that just goes against the grain of their character. I need them to start thinking about social media the same way they think about every other kind of social [...]

This post is going to sound a little strange to people who know me and realize how much time I spend trying to get more and more winemakers online.  But I recently read an article and heard a flurry of tweets that have me thinking about an interesting double standard that exists in a lot [...]

When I first heard about Cabernet Day, my immediate reaction was to jump on board.  And I kind of assumed that everybody would follow me unquestioningly… but there have been some questions, rightfully posed, as to why exactly I’m hosting a Cab Day event in the Languedoc.  I want to take a moment to explain [...]

I feel really good when my wines receive positive comments and I brag about them in this blog.  However, I still feel strange bragging about nice things that get said about me.   But my parents assure me that the Internet exists in large part to brag about your exploits. So uhm Robert Joseph, who [...]

Is it part of our job as winemakers in a rural area to assess the current Internet landscape and retool some of the services out their to serve our needs? I’m working on this idea and I’ll keep coming back to it. For sure, there are ways that social media can sell wine like when Twitter-ers bid on wine at a Toques et Clochers auction in rural France. But we might have to actively study these examples if we want to replicate their success.

So I set up Wine Everybody as my home page for a week. Wine Everybody is a feed aggregator and social media platform specifically oriented toward wine. It takes all the feeds from good wine blogs, tweets related to wine, message boards, etc. and puts them in one place. It is currently in beta.