It’s exciting to see other folks starting to pick up on the potential of the semantic web and wine. At Scrugy we’ve already laid the groundwork for mining microcontent embedded in web pages and RSS feeds. In fact, the first phase has already been implemented in our wine-smart web crawler and feed aggregation services where we are harvesting wine review information from tasting notes formatted using microformats.

So what else is possible with the marriage of microformats and wine related content? Well, here is a glimpse of our roadmap in this area.

We see tremendous potential in the development of open specifications for representing lots of other structured wine information. For example, on winery web sites alone the hCard/adr and geo microformats can be used when displaying contact information, tasting room addresses, and GPS coordinates. In addition, hCalendar can be used when listing winery events and hListing when listing wine releases.  Of course, wine retail sites can also use hListing.

The possibilities for developing applications that leverage this information are very exciting. Let’s consider what’s possible with a site like Scrugy. Since Scrugy is an aggregator of wine information, it will automatically pick up winery addresses, geo coordinates, events, wine releases, and so on from winery sites that are using microformats when they’re crawled. That means these wineries will only be responsible for keeping their websites up-to-date and will no longer have the chore of propagating updated information out to the many sites that list information on them. Essentially what we’re talking about here is turning the current model inside out where wineries will no longer have to push data out but instead tools like Scrugy can come and get the information. Updates are then more timely and perhaps most importantly the distributed information is more accurate.

Circling back to tasting notes and microformats, the advantages for the wine consumer are equally appealing. At the end of my last post on HDTNs (High Definition Tasting Notes), I touched on the power of aggregating structured wine review information. Consider the situation where a tasting note aggregator such as Scrugy has developed a detailed tasting descriptor profile for a particular wine. This profile would be the result of summarizing tasting notes from several sites and employing an authority weighting for tasting notes from reviewers of distinction (critics, wine makers, and so on). Then consider a wine newbie who comes along and can only tell you the name of a wine that they liked. Scrugy can take the dominant tasting descriptors from that wine and find different wines with similar profiles. This opens the door to extremely powerful and accurate wine recommendations and the opportunity to discover wines from producers and regions that previously may never had been thought possible.

So of the other Web/Wine 2.0 companies out there, who is ready to take the next step? Andrea Johnston with Inertia Beverage Group is already calling this “Wine 3.0″.  Is there anyone willing to join me in defining open specifications for bringing the semantic web and wine together? I’d be happy to host a wiki to get things going.

Tim over at Winecast is debating the question of whether “wine 2.0″ sites like Scrugy are just for (wine) geeks. Naturally I’ve got an opinion (or two) on this.

First, like Tim, I must admit up front that I am something of a wine geek (link to my personal blog) and I’m absolutely a tech nut. Over the years as a software developer I’ve seen many technical trends on the Net come and go. Sure there are some concepts that go nowhere but you can pretty much count on nearly every effort contributing somehow to the evolution of the Internet. Some ideas contribute more than others but the overall application development ecosystem on the Internet will take it all in and bubble the best ideas to the top. My point in all this is that we are still very early in the lifecycle of the Internet and to claim that one type of application that is popular in one sector will never be successful in another (i.e. wine) is a tough call to make.  Are any of the web 2.0 sites focused on wine even a year old? Heck, most wine blogs are less than a year old too.

Another point that I’d like to make is that the first users of almost every new site are geeks. Let’s face it. We geeks are always online, checking out new sites and ideas the moment they’re unveiled. So of course the initial user base of a new crop of applications will have a heavy geek factor. Does this mean that these sites will ultimately fail to gain mass appeal? The challenge, as I see it, is for these sites to continue to evolve and mature, building upon a proven formula, until they hit on the right implementation. I think Cork’d is a great example of a young wine web 2.0 site that seems to appeal most to the non wine geek. In fact, I’ve heard several wine geeks say that Cork’d just doesn’t have enough of the techno wine geek features they’d like to see.

I hope we all can agree that wine related sites have a place online. Wine quality continues to improve around the world and good quality wine is easier than ever to find at lower price points. As wine continues to reach new heights of popularity, especially in the new world, wine newbies will naturally look online to feed their new interest. But what will they be looking for and how will they want to access information about wine? Buying wine online is a no-brainer. But how does someone new to wine get to the point of making a purchase decision? You’re lucky if a wine newbie can tell what they like and dislike in wine let alone naming a specific wine that they liked. I believe that this is where wine sites need to start. That is, easy, intuitive, and approachable access to information on wine. This is exactly what we’re trying to provide on Scrugy. Are we there yet? Probably not. Are moving in that direction? You bet!

What do you think?