What if you could design your own RSS feed that pulled together the latest happenings for just the topics you were interested in? Well, a small but powerful feature was just added to Scrugy that allows you to do just that. Here’s how it works.

Say your favorite wine region is Paso Robles and you’d like to build an RSS feed that provides the latest wine blog posts mentioning the area. The first thing you’d need to do is submit a blog search on Scrugy for “paso robles”.  To do this just type “paso robles” (in this case include the quotes so Scrugy treats it as a phrase–this will improve the accuracy of the results), select “just wine related blogs” from the search type drop-down, and click “Search”. The search results will show you all blog posts with the phrase “paso robles”. Now since you want the feed to always show you the latest blog posts, sort the results by newest to oldest by clicking on the “Newest” link (just above the first search result). Great, now you’ve got the results the way you want them. The last step is to grab the RSS feed for the search so you can add it to your favorite RSS reader. This is where the new feature comes in. You will notice a small orange “XML” image along the upper right side of the search results page. This link will provide the very same search results of your search but in RSS format. Right-click to copy the link to your computer’s clipboard so you can paste into your favorite reader.

Now whenever you access this feed you will receive the latest results from Scrugy. Comments? Suggestions? Let us know. Also, thanks to eljefe from Twisted Oak Winery Blog for suggesting the feature.

The next step was to get them indexed on Scrugy. This happens one of two ways. Either the Scrugy crawler will pick them up when it periodically crawls pages on WineLog or Scrugy can pick them up from an RSS feed.  The RSS feed is the better way to go, though, since it will get the most recent tasting notes indexed as the RSS feed is updated on WineLog. The crawler is somewhat random and may only periodically visit WineLog. Since Jason has an RSS feed for the latest WineLog updates, I added this feed to the ever growing list of wine-related RSS feeds that Scrugy monitors. There was one catch, though. In order for Scrugy to pick up microformats in RSS feeds, the feed items themselves must be formatted with microformats too. Since that was going to be a lot more work for Jason, I made some changes to Scrugy to follow the links (i.e. the <link> element) associated with each RSS item and check those pages for microformats. Since the pages pointed to the by links were the ones Jason had changed, Scrugy picked them just fine. So now the Scrugy crawler will detect tasting notes on WineLog as well as the Scrugy RSS feed fetcher.

So far a couple hundred tasting notes have been indexed and more are being picked up all the time. To see a list of WineLog tasting notes indexed on Scrugy, click on the following search link.

WineLog Tasting Notes

(Note: the above tasting note search is using the “site:” search field to limit results just to “winelog.net”. To do the same for any other site, just include “site:example.com” with your search. For example, to search all WineLog tasting notes that include the word “merlot”, enter “site:winelog.net merlot” (without the quotes) in the search field. Be sure to also select “tasting notes” from the search type drop-down)

Thanks to Jason for allowing WineLog’s wine reviews to be indexed on Scrugy and for formatting them with microformats. With a total of nearly 100,000 tasting notes indexed so far, the addition of WineLog will further enrich the search results for all users. Jason and I are also discussing ways to integrate Scrugy’s aggregation services on WineLog. In the end, WineLog users, Scrugy users, and the wine community will all benefit. Yet another hallmark of the web 2.0 movement.

Since I’m drinking a Concannon Petite Sirah this evening, a search for blogs mentioning this wine would look like the following screen shot.

Once I click the “Search” button, Scrugy displays the results ordered by relevance. But what if I want the results ordered by the most recent blog post? No problem. Scrugy allows you to order results by relevance or by the newest or oldest post date.

Why risk your wine searches to any other site? Scrugy delivers the results you’re looking for the way you want them.

Suggestions? Comments? Let us know.

Now that the holidays are just about wrapped up, I’ll be writing about upcoming enhancements to the site. And if you have any ideas for how to improve Scrugy, be sure to let me know either by submitting feedback or commenting here.

I’ve dubbed this initiative Wineformats.

We’ll be discussing ideas and issues related to this effort on a new Wineformats Google Group and will be publishing the results of our work on the Wineformats wiki.

If you’re interested in getting involved, check out the wiki and join the discussion group. And this initiative is not just for the programmer types out there. Anyone with wine domain expertise or an interest in shaping the next wave of innovation for the online wine community is welcome.

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.

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?

For those tasting notes that actually make it online, we want to help them live up to their full potential. That is, to offer a usable profile of not only the wine and producer but also of the reviewer. What do I mean by this? Well, imagine if you could take all tasting notes written in any language for a particular wine from several web sites, normalize their scores into a consistent scale, extract and summarize the tasting descriptors from all reviewers, apply an authority filter to add weight to tasting notes from recognized experts, and then provide a single global view of the wine from all of this information. This would give you a powerful tasting profile of a wine that is the true result of what people are actually experiencing. And this view can be expanded to provide tasting profiles at the vintage, producer, region, and varietal levels. Sound interesting? Scrugy is already doing this today!

Recently I wrote about Scrugy’s support for microformats. In this post I’d like to take it a step further and talk about what I like to call High Definition Tasting Notes, or HDTNs.

Today’s “standard definition” tasting note typically includes the name of the wine, when it was tasted, a score, and a description of the wine. The description can take the form of just a few key tasting descriptors such as ”black cherry”, “full-bodied”, and “smooth tannins” or it can include paragraphs describing both the wine and the tasting experience itself. Modern wine community sites such as Cork’d and WineLog.net also allow users to indicate one or more terms as tags. These tags are helpful in isolating key elements of the tasting note and then allow aggregation of those tags via tag clouds. However, when it comes to capturing finer granularity in tasting descriptors for a wine the typical web 2.0 tagging approach falls short. On its own a tag cannot account for the additional dimensions of intensity, tasting timeline (when the descriptor occurred during the taste), and whether the descriptor was appealing or not to the reviewer. By intensity I mean whether the tasting descriptor was picked up as just a hint or was it a dominant flavor. For the timeline, was the flavor detected at the front, middle, finish or throughout the taste?

It is the addition of these additional dimensions to the standard tag that adds “high definition” to a tasting note. Now instead of just seeing the most prominent flavors and textures that the reviewer detected in a wine, with more definition you get a more nuanced and finer grained view of the wine.  A “hint of cherries on the front”, “too much toasted oak throughout”, “beautifully soft tannins on the finish” is much more telling than simply “cherries”, “toasted oak”, ”smooth tannins”.

So what does one of these HDTNs look like? Well, the beauty of using microformats to annotate a tasting note means that it can look any way you’d like. One of the microformat principles is to “design for humans first, machines second”. This means that microformats should not intrude on the “look” of the content they annotate.

Let’s look at an example. Here is a tasting note that has been fully annotated using microformats. The styling has been kept plain on purpose.

The tasting note tells us a lot about the wine, the reviewer, and the reviewer’s evaluation of the wine. And there are some tags broken out into the categories “appearance”, “aroma”, “taste”, and “texture”. You will also notice that some tags are displayed using a larger or smaller font. In this case, the font size of the tag represents the intensity of the tasting descriptor in the wine.

Now let’s look at the HTML source code for the tasting note. I have marked all standard microformat class names in bold and all wine-specific class names in blue.

<div class="hreview tn“>

  <h2 class=”item wine“>
    <span class=”fn“>
      <span class=”vintage“>2003</span>
      <span class=”producer“>Scott Harvey</span>
      <span class=”designation“>Mountain Selection</span>
      <span class=”varietal“>Zinfandel</span>
      <span class=”region“>Amador County</span>
    </span>
    <span class=”country“>USA</span>
    <abbr class=”alcohol” title=”14.5″>14.5%</abbr>
  </h2>

  <p class=”description“>
    Scott Harvey has deep roots in the Sierra Foothills and it
    shows in his red label zinfandel. The color is not as dark
    as many zins from this area but the flavors are fruity yet
    lean. A very nice zin.
  </p>

  <p>Reviewed by
    <span class=”reviewer vcard“>
      <a class=”url fn” href=”http://www.secondleaf.com”>
        james
      </a>
    </span>
    on
    <abbr class=”dtreviewed” title=”2006-11-03T18:19:00-0800″>
      Friday, November 3, 2006
    </abbr>
  </p>

  <p class=”rating“>Score:
    <span class=”value“>3.9</span>
    out of
    <span class=”best“>5</span>
  </p>

  <p>Price:
    <span class=”money“>
      <abbr class=”currency” title=”USD”>$</abbr>
      <abbr class=”amount” title=”13.99″>13.99</abbr>
      <abbr class=”unit” title=”750ml”>/bottle</abbr>
    </span>
  </p>

  <h4>Tags</h4>

  <p class=”appearance“>Appearance:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd hint-medium” href=”…/tag/medium”>
      medium
    </a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/garnet”>garnet</a>
  </p>

  <p class=”aroma“>Aroma:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/tar”>tar</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/raspberry”>raspberry</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd hint” href=”…/tag/spice”>spice</a>
  </p>

  <p class=”taste“>Taste:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd medium-strong” href=”…/tag/raspberry”>
      raspberry
    </a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd medium-strong” href=”…/tag/cranberry”>
      cranberry
    </a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/spice”>spice</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/tart”>tart</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/caramel”>caramel</a>
  </p>

  <p class=”texture“>Texture:
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/vibrant”>vibrant</a>,
    <a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” href=”…/tag/lean”>lean</a>
  </p>

</div>

Now I realize there is a lot here so let’s break it down. The entire note itself is wrapped in an element with the class names “hreview” and “tn”. “hreview” is the microformat class name indicating that the interior of the element represents a review of something. This something could be a product, service, business, event, etc. In our case, we’re reviewing a wine. The class name “tn” further specifies that this review is a “tasting note”. This is important should a site review more than just wines on their pages (i.e. reviews of wineries, wine gadgets, regions, and so on).

There are four basic parts to the content inside the “hreview” div: wine identification, tasting description/notes, tasting details, and tasting tags.

The wine identification is wrapped in an element using the “item” class name. Within the “item”, there is the “fn” class. This represents the formatted name for the item. In this case, the item is a wine. Since the name of a wine can be broken down into relevant and useful pieces, there are class names for the wine’s vintage, producer, designation, varietal(s), and region. The only logically required elements here are producer and at least one of designation, varietal(s), or region. Two other item elements captured in this case include the country and alcohol. Since these elements are not part of the wine’s name they are not included inside the “fn” element.

Next, the description or notes for the tasting note are indicated with the “description” class.

There are also details about the tasting event itself including information about the “reviewer”, when the wine was reviewed (”dtreviewed”), the reviewer’s score (”rating”) for the wine, and how much was paid (or the cost) of the wine.

Finally, the last element of this tasting note that I’d like to describe are the tasting descriptors or “tags”.  The hReview microformat allows for zero or more tags to be associated with the review using the “tag” class. In order to support the “high definition” concepts that I described above, Scrugy allows tags to be grouped into 5 categories: appearance, aroma, taste, texture, and overall. To support intensity, the class names of “hint”, “hint-medium”, “medium”, “medium-strong”, and “strong” can be specified. The default is “medium”. For tasting timeline, the class names “throughout”, “start”, “start-middle”, “middle”, “middle-finish”, or “finish” can be used. The default timeline is “throughout”. Lastly, to indicate whether a particular descriptor was pleasing or not, the reviewer can use the VoteLinks microformat (the default is “vote-abstain” unless otherwise obvious as a wine flaw).

So to wrap up this long post, here is an excerpt of HTML source code that represents the tasting phrase: “hint of cherries on the front, too much toasted oak throughout, and beautifully soft tannins on the finish”.

...
hint of
<a rel="tag” class=”tnd hint start” href=”…/tag/cherry”>
  cherries
</a>
on the front, too much
<a rel=”tag” class=”tnd” rev=”vote-against” href=”…/tag/toasted+oak”>
  toasted oak
</a>
throughout, and beautifully
<a rel=”tag” class=”tnd finish” rev=”vote-for” href=”…/tag/soft+tannins”>
  soft tannins
</a>
on the finish.
…

In my next post I will describe how the information expressed in tasting notes using microformats and the wine-specific extensions described here can be put to use to make incredibly powerful wine recommendations and support the emergence of tasting profiles at the reviewer, producer/winery, varietal, and region levels.

For example, check out Scrugy’s Dry Creek Valley page. Not only does Scrugy integrate the Yahoo! Maps service to give you satellite and map views of the area, we also include local weather conditions, community average score, and a tag cloud of the wine community’s tasting descriptors/tags for the region. And when we say community, we’re not just talking about Scrugy users here. Scrugy aggregates wine information from several sites that provide tasting notes–a much more accurate representation of the wine community.

The winery detail page provides a similar view with a map of the winery’s location, local weather, and community score and tags from tasting notes for the winery. Staying within the Dry Creek Valley, check out the David Coffaro page on Scrugy.

Look for more great aggregated data and information on Scrugy in the coming days.