The private beta is over and Scrugy is now publicly available!

I would like to thank all of the beta testers that provided excellent feedback throughout the closed beta. We will continue to incorporate your ideas and suggestions going forward. There are several exciting and innovative features in the pipeline that I’ll be blogging about in the coming days so keep your comments coming.

Lots of us like to write tasting notes. In fact, there are millions of tasting notes out on the web. Many just have a score and maybe a few impressions of the wine. Others, though, include detailed information about the wine, background on the winery, and what food was paired with it. Some tasting notes are written by industry pundits who can make or break a winery with a score and review while others are written by wine novices trying to get their head around what they like and dislike in wine. Some tasting notes are added to blog posts, many to wine forums/bulletin boards, and still more to online wine communities.

At Scrugy, our challenge is to make sense of all these tasting notes. A daunting task indeed. So far we’ve done a pretty good job of letting you find tasting notes using Scrugy’s search engine. Also, some sites provide RSS feeds of their tasting notes that Scrugy can use to further narrow its focus. However, whether the tasting note is in the middle of a web page, buried in a bulletin board post, or part of a feed, isolating the vital and relevant parts of the tasting note among the surrounding content is nearly impossible. What we’re talking about here is basic information about the wine (vintage, producer, region), the score for the wine, information about the reviewer, and some impressions on the wine. Well, this effort just go a whole lot easier today with Scrugy’s support for the hReview microformat.

One of the more promising concepts in the Web 2.0 movement is the idea of a semantic web. That is, delivering content that is both meaningful to humans and computers. At the center of the semantic web are microformats. Put simply, microformats are lightweight and open data formats that build upon existing standards. There are microformats defined for representing people & organizations, events, social networks, tags, lists, reviews, and more. Microformats can be used anywhere well-formed (X)HTML is found, including web pages and RSS feeds.

So what does this have to do with tasting notes? By simply annotating a tasting note as an hReview on web pages, blog posts, forum posts, and feed items, Scrugy can pick up the detailed information it needs to properly index the tasting note. Let’s look at an example.

Here is the HTML for a simple tasting note as it may appear on a web page or in a blog post.

<div>
  <h1>2004 Navarro Pinot Noir Anderson Valley</h1>
  <p>Score: 5 out of 5</p>
  <blockquote>
    This vintage is intense: lots of berry, cherry flavors with
    a patina of toasty oak.
  </blockquote>
  <p>
    Reviewed by <a href="http://.../ted">Ted</a>
    on September 3, 2005
  </p>
</div>

Now the same tasting note annotated as an hReview would look something like this (additions in bold):

<div class="hreview“>
  <h1 class=”item“>2004 Navarro Pinot Noir Anderson Valley</h1>
  <p>Score: <abbr class=”rating” title=”5“>5 out of 5</abbr></p>
  <blockquote class=”description“>
    This vintage is intense: lots of berry, cherry flavors with
    a patina of toasty oak.
  </blockquote>
  <p class=”reviewer vcard“>
    Reviewed by <a class=”url fn” href=”http://…/ted”>Ted</a> on
    <abbr class=”dtreviewed” title=”20050903“>
      September 3, 2005
    </abbr>
  </p>
</div>

So with the addition of just a few class attributes and the <abbr> tag to the HTML, we now have a tasting note that is formatted just like the original but has the advantage of being computer readable. The “hreview” class name is what indicates that the nested content refers to a review (a review of a wine in our case). Nested within this element are elements with the pre-defined microformat classes ”item”, “rating”, “description”, “reviewer”, and “dtreviewed”. These classes tell us the name of the item being reviewed, the rating or score, a description of the review, who reviewed the item, and when it was reviewed. Instead of an opaque sequence of HTML tags, Scrugy can now interpret this markup as a tasting note and index it as such.

Although this example is simple, it does illustrate how seamlessly existing markup can be microformat-enabled without imposing restrictions on how it is displayed. And just as tools have evolved to make it easy for anyone to work with HTML to create blogs and web pages, new tools will emerge that make it easy for us to generate microformatted content as well. In fact, look for a new tools section on Scrugy that will, among other things, allow you to author a tasting note suitable for pasting into your favorite page editor or submission tool.

Stay tuned…

Scrugy, the Internet’s largest and most discerning search engine dedicated to wine, eclipsed the 4 million page mark today. That’s right, Scrugy now allows you to search over 4.2 million pages from nearly 5,000 wine related sites.

Winery websites, wine blogs, wine podcasts, wine communities, wine associations, tasting notes, industry pundits… you’ll find them all and more on Scrugy.

One of the nice touches on Scrugy is the ability to listen to a podcast right from the user interface. So if there’s a podcast description that gets your attention, just click on the listen icon in the post details on Scrugy. A small window will popup and the show will automatically start playing. Move the player to the side and continue browsing while you listen.

Even if you’re already hooked up in iTunes with your favorite podcasts syncing to your iPod, this Scrugy feature is a great way to discover new wine podcasts or to give a quick listen to a podcast right on your computer.

Scrugy now offers aggregated outbound feeds for each of the categories that it maintains as well as a “super” feed that covers all categories. Each feed includes the 20 most recent posts from all sites within the category.

So if you already use an aggregator such as My Yahoo, Google, BlogBridge, or Netvibes to monitor your feed subscriptions, add one or all of the Scrugy feeds to get your daily wine fix in one convenient dose. And if you join Scrugy and setup your My Scrugy page with your favorite wine feeds, Scrugy will give you a feed aggregating just those sites too.

Just look for the feed logo on the homepage next to each category name for the RSS subscription link. On your My Scrugy page, look for the “subscribe” link on your Subscriptions tab.

A quick announcement about a small, but very cool, feature that was released on Scrugy earlier today.

With the new aggregation services enhancements, Scrugy has been tracking several blogs authored by winery owners and winemakers in the Winery Blogs category. However, until today those blogs weren’t connected to the detail pages for the wineries they belonged to. Now there is a two-way link between the feed for the winery and the winery page. This means that on the “New Releases” page you will see a link to the winery detail page for the winery associated with a post and on the winery detail page you will see a new tab called “Blog” that lists the latest posts from the winery’s blog(s).

Check out the following winery detail pages for just a few examples.

• Anne Amie
• Goosecross Cellars
• Twisted Oak Winery

So why do I think this is such a cool enhancement? Put simply, it allows winery bloggers to impact the content on the detail page for their winery on Scrugy without having to submit changes to or update Scrugy in any way. All they have to do is create a post on their blog and Scrugy will pick it up and integrate it on their detail page. Isn’t RSS a beautiful thing?

What do you think? Let me know.

I am pleased to announce the launch of the blog for Scrugy, the fastest and easiest way to learn about and find anything related to wine. We are very excited about the impending launch of the latest round of enhancements to the Scrugy platform and will use this blog to talk about new features, planned features, and anything related to wine and Scrugy.

Your feedback is very important to us and hope that this blog will serve as another great tool for interacting with you, the users of Scrugy.