Every Wine Tasting Note Site Should Be Freebasing!
Thats right. I said it. Although it may not be what you’re thinking.
Can you guess what's wrong with tasting note web sites? Exactly, none (and I mean N-O-N-E) have reached anything close to critical mass of users to make their notes useful. Why is that? Well there are too many wines every year to have multiple reviews per wine. So every wine tasting note site tries to get their hands around an unbounded number of wines and create a tasting note site that is actually useful. NONE have succeeded and even the biggest are only useful for organization purposes (CellarTracker) not for looking up wines.
One approach with promise is Snooth, but they’re actually smarter about it. Its not about tasting notes, its more about personalizing wine selections for you and if there are tasting notes to help then great. I actually like that concept. They'll bring in a gambit of ratings and notes and attempt to normalize them and match a wine to your liking. This is (obviously) not a tasting note record keeping site but it leverages that function.
So what's this about “Freebasing”? Well, if you haven’t heard, there is another approach to gathering data out there and they’re gaining steam. Freebase is a massive database that is completely open so that a site can use as its database as a backend. Then anyone can query this DB and get at that information or submit information and contribute to the collective. Also, tags in that information make connection automatically regardless of the original source. The best explanation of this is here, at Tim O’Rielly’s blog (the guy who originally coined “web 2.0”). Its an instance of the semantic web (what some call “web 3.0”). The advantage? Since a tasting notes are not a business but a feature, if all the sites created real business plans with tasting note functions as a part then there wouldn’t be a need to hide the notes in an isolated database. Sure, protect your user DB but submit your notes to Freebase. Gary V can go on ranting and raving with the Vayniacs, Snooth can continue making educated selections for you, WineQ could add value to their custom wine clubs. These are all sites that don’t depend on notes as the core of the business. One thing I won't get into is this aspect (and the power of Freebase) - if Winehiker were to create an application that was a database of trails in California and some wines he experienced there, then Freebase would automagically create a query result for any other application that connects wines related to the notes Winehiker made about his travels and the wines on each of those trails with other wine notes submitted from these sites. You would start to see a world evolving of things connected to wines and trips and tastes that you've never imagined before...but thats a whole different post!
Anyway, Freebase allows sites like these tasting note sites to be built and while they individually create communities for whatever purpose they are all adding to Borg collective known as Freebase.
There is one other approach – creating a micro-format that makes a standard format that allows any note written out there be crawled and scanned into a DB automatically…what-ever. Thats never going to happen unless Microsoft, Apple, and every other user interface company decides they want to support MicroFormat for wine tasting notes. Chances of that happening? Pretty much Zilch…
It would be far easier for other sites that have note functionality to migrate their DB to Freebase, effectively merging all note DBs, and write database calls to the Freebase API rather than their own MySQL “Silo” of information. You think CellarTracker is cool? Imagine every note ever entered into a site on the Internet, regardless of the site, being available to Snooth or WineQ or any other site that wants it!! I’m an Alpha member of Freebase and I can attest that its difficult to explain the potential impact of this site, which brings me to the practical, marketing side of my brain – I’ve seen too many technologies that were just too far ahead and couldn’t survive until the world caught up. I hope Freebase doesn’t go that route…
Every wine note site in the world should be Freebasing!
Enjoy the Wine Life!
Comments 17 Comments
I think what we need is for the dust to settle, a few clear leaders to emerge, and then we will get greater consolidation.
If they DBs were shared on Freebase, then not only would a query that is looking up wine simultaneously check everyone's DB (of course some standards would have to apply to the entry, maybe CellarTracker-type could force a standard entry by sheer market power)and give you what you need (i.e. better chance of a hit). Then other programs being able to use this open information for "intelligent" correlation.
Having all the databases closed on a bunch of small to medium sites is what is holding back online notes from being as useful as possible.
If CellarTracker is depending on the notes in the DB forever they could be in trouble in the not too distant future.
Do you know that someone's already working on a wine browser using freebase using the Freebase API?
K.
jb
I think Snooth is shooting for the less knowledgeable. I found the same thing as you but given I don't think I was the target, I wasn't holding it against them. I could be wrong though.
Kirrily,
Thanks for the link. I'll definitely check it out!
Sure factual data on wine such as its varietal composition is probably not copyrightable, but reviews certainly are! Also, even accessing purely factual information is protected by "trespass of chattel". Both EBay and ticketmaster successfully sued "aggregators" that were mining their sites.
Am I missing something here... or did Snooth not consider this, and the lawyers for wine.com just haven't pounced yet?
Here's a link to some of our merchant partners: http://www.snooth.com/partners. These companies send us data.
Philip
Snooth
If merchants added the information to a standard-ish format, the info would already be available to their customers looking to track, add and save that information. The most useful would then be adding value to their customers.
Non retailing sites would then be encouraged to adopt it to access the wealth of information available, thus also driving traffic to the merchants.
The way to do this is simple - BE ANAL RETENTIVE WITH YOUR DATA - Make sure that there are no Burgundies and Burgundys as seperate wines. Or other problems. I think freebase is a nice idea, but I really don't see it working until I can use it with my blog, and other bloggers and web geeks can easily implement it themselves. At that point the knowledge will grow, as others add info and the DB expands. I guess though that this will only lead to many duplicates of wines, and no standard naming solution.
I also agree with Robert - Merchants could make their jobs easier and ours.
I'm in a meeting writing this comment so I'm sure this comment is clear as mud.
- A key goal of freebase is to "reconcile entities". In other words, there shouldn't be a two places to collect information about the same thing -- eg., your Burgandys vs. Burgandies -- in Freebase these would be a single topic. There's a process for merging them together.
- Currently Joel is right that we are mostly a back end service. The current Freebase UI is far to general to be useful to a community of wine tasters, but we are working on features that would help non-programmers keep data in freebase and provide javascript tools to bring that data into other sites without technical work.
Which leads me to:
What features would you like to see on your blog that could be backed by a structured database?
Same is true of wine tasting note sites. Every DB saves the notes in their own fashion. What a site (like Snooth.com) needs to do is work with every individual database (retailer, tasting site, what have you) to integrate the site's custom DB schema into their own algorithm or database.
The point of my post is that if all these sites could use some sort of framework and periodically upload to a site like Freebase, then, at a bare minimum, FB can start to create a huge wine review DB that can be queried. Not to mention other, more intelligent "Web3.0" connections it may make.
I really hope other comment on this topic b/c there have been some lively debates on the topic.