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.

The Short version:

Pros

• fast-loading
• no bugs
• responsive design team
• flexible search parameters
• highly customizable
• winnows out affiliate marketers and spam
• does everything you expect (e.g. link to facebook and twitter accounts, one click publishing)

Cons

• doesn’t track what I’ve already read
• I personally dislike some of the CSS (buttons pop up when you point your cursor at a block of text. it moves everything in the column downward and disorients me)
• goofy name (I’m one to talk, right?)

Suggestions

• Add a “follow this person on twitter” button
• Add a “rss url” field so that I can add good feeds to other aggregators I use
• Find out if I’m the only person who hates the popup buttons

The Long Version:

I wanted to give it an honest try to see if it would become a permanent part of my life or not.   My impression is that it’s an overall worthwhile website that works remarkably well considering it’s only in beta.

Now, technically, I set up a specific search query as my homepage.  Rather than loading the generic “Tons of articles about wine” page, I load specifically to a narrowed down search for the term “Languedoc” or “Roussillon”.  This is more pertinent to my work so I said to myself it would be more useful.  And it’s a better point of comparison to the tools I already use (like google alerts for the phrases “Languedoc vin” “Languedoc wine” “Roussillon vin” and “Roussillon wine”).

Immediately, I have to say it’s pretty cool that I don’t need FOUR separate search queries on Wine Everybody.  They have a really simple interface that lets me search for articles with Languedoc or Roussillon and then the entire website only reads stuff about wine and vin, so I get all four of my usual feeds in one little bundle.

Also, it’s pretty admirable that most of the content from my google alerts also pops up in the Wine Everybody interface.  I was worried that some news feeds like local Languedoc papers might not be included in their feed, but I generally saw the same stories published in both Wine Everybody and my google alerts.  Wine Everybody runs a lot faster than Google Reader too.

The only real downside is that Wine Everybody doesn’t track which articles I’ve read quite as clearly as Reader does. . . but that might just be because I haven’t explored the site enough.  Plus the site designers at Vinternet are pretty savvy, so there is still time for them to add features like this one.

While I haven’t fully explored it, I also enjoy Wine Everybody’s level of interaction with message boards.  Internet forums often get overlooked by the feeds I currently have aggregated.  I think a lot of the time new posts don’t have all the same keywords in them and that’s how they get ignored.

Anyway, I’m kind of rambling.  But I wanted to write up a little review of my first experiences with Wine Everybody.  I think the name is sort of goofy.  But I like what the website does.  Will it stay as my homepage?  For now, yes.  On one of my computers.  Although I feel bad because this experiment is adding like ten minutes to my dad’s computer time each morning as he struggles to type G-O-O-G-L-E-.-C-O-M every time he opens a new window.  Bless him.

I really hate manifestos.  I think that most of my favorite movements start to die the day they write down what they’re really trying to do… like defining the movement is overly restrictive and dogmatic.  But I was busy writing up a general presentation of Love That Languedoc, and I found myself falling into this militant prose that sounds a ton like a manifesto.  Well, if I go around saying “no manifesto” all the time, then I’m still being just as dogmatic and restrictive as if I had written down my goals.  OH WELL.  Here it is:

I refuse to leave our fate in the hands of the global press who are, at best, mildly curious about our region.  And, at worst, totally oblivious to it.  Aside from a few rare examples, the world’s largest wine producer is also the world’s most ignored beauty.

Well this is the part of the movie where the downtrodden Languedoc takes off her horn-rimmed glasses and lets her hair down and the popular kid (or Henry Higgins, depending on what age you are) suddenly realizes that the coolest girl he knows was there under his nose all along.

Love That Languedoc is my personal project to show the world what it’s missing and now it’s developing a new branch.  I want to teach our winemakers how to communicate (without relying on journalists or  critics or ME) to a world that is ready to hear them.

I guess I’m thankful that the region needs me.  But the day I’m unnecessary will be a great day indeed.  We have an amazing advantage in sheer number of winemakers.  And our wines are distributed globally as both prestigious cult winesand large volume convenience store wines.  So people are already talking about us and our wines.

The next step is responding to that conversation.  We need to start training our winemakers to check email and set up a google alert for every estate in the Languedoc-Roussillon.  If only 1% of our winemakers spoke up every time somebody mentions their wines online, we would flood the Internet with our voices.  We could show our consumers that we appreciate their drinking habits.

And once winemakers start communicating successfully with the consumer, it’s much more likely that they will be willing to adopt more advanced online tools like a blog or a twitter.  And they’ll be much more likely to “get it” because it’s part of an authentic foray into communication and not some contrived business effort with no ROI.

And on that day, I’ll just be a happy little winemaker who runs a video blog for the fun of it.  And who will laugh about the old days when he would accidentally write a manifesto while trying to explain why he blogs.

There.  So I guess the conclusion is nice because it points out why this manifesto is silly.  I only blog because it’s fun.  I’m happy that it’s increasing my exposure and wine sales and I’m definitely finding ways to maximize the synergy between my blog and my website.  But ultimately, the blog is for fun.  And sometimes I get these lofty goals to sign everybody up for Google Alerts or whatever.  But ultimately, even those initiatives are an attempt to make my blog redundant.  One day, when everybody does their own online promotion, I’ll be useless.  And it’ll just be for fun again.

Until then, sign up for a freaking Google Alert.