Here’s a personal message from me:

Why start a Blog?  I think Seth Godin sums it up well here:

Wow!  That’s all I can say about the blur that was the 2nd annual Wine Blogger’s Conference held in Sonoma, CA.  As a first-timer, I was very impressed with the agenda and the events that were held… and I was even more impressed with meeting my fellow bloggers face-to-face for the first time.  To share everything with you may take a few posts, but don’t worry, we’ve got nothing but time in this world, right?  And as long as you have a glass of wine in your hand, it’s all good.

First, I need to thank the Open Wine Consortium and Zephyr Wine Adventures for orchestrating such a jam-packed weekend.  The only feedback I have is that wi-fi and bandwidth availability should be a pretty high-priority on the list for next year’s event and let’s please add in some time between sessions for networking and collaboration.  Additionally, all the sponsors listed here must be thanked for making this thing even possible.  Thanks to them, all our glasses were kept full and several wineries allowed us to visit.

Here are some wineries and winemakers I was able to chat with and get a feel for what it’s like standing in their shoes and hopefully they were able to get a feel for what social media can do for them.  Please check them out!

   Randall Graham (“The Original Rhone Deranger”) – Bonny Doon — Great website, by the way!

   Jennifer Higgins – Lancaster Estate - So laid back and fun… I’ll have more on my visit to Lancaster Estate later…

   Peter Spann – Spann Vineyards - Great engagement story, just ask @RickBakas

   Lesley Russell – St. Supery- Recently hired a Director of Social Media (Rick Bakas)

   Greg La Follette – Tandem – Just love the cycling reference

   Linzi Gay – Clif Family Winery & Farm – Here’s another extreme sport reference, I can’t help it.  Here’s an earlier interviewwith Sarah Gott — p.s. her Syrah at the WBC rawk’d!

   Jac Cole – Spring Mountain Vineyard- One of the oldest wineries in the area and Bee-you-tiful!

YouTube - Link toWBC09 Montage

Finally, here are some new friends that I met that you should definitely follow online if you want to know anything about wine or social media in the wine industry… I can say I learned quite a lot by talking with these wonderful people – again, this may not be a complete list and may take a few posts to share:

   Jim Morris – Michel-Schlumberger – @sonomawineguy

   Shana Ray – @Sharayray

   Christophe Smith – Titus Vineyards – @cork_dork and @Titus_TV

   Randy Hall – Wine Biz Radio – @randyhall and @winebizradio

   Rick Bakas – St. Supery - @RickBakas and @StSupery

   Frank Gutierrez – @FrankLovesWine

   Paul Mabray – VinTank – @PaulMabray and @VinTank

   Ashley Bellview – VinTank - @ashleybellview

   Eric Hwang – @bricksofwine

   Alana Gentry – @girlwithaglass

   Andrew Lazorchak – www.winesoiree.com

   Ken Hoggins – www.KensWineGuide.com

   Michael Bottigliero -  www.windycitywineguy.com

   Fred and Eva Swan – @NorCalWine

   Chris Donatiello – C. Dontiello Winery – @cdonatiello

It’s that time of year.  Time for a whirlwind of wine tasting and tours.  Last Fall it was Willamette Valley, this time we are headed for Sonoma.  Thanks to my many online and local friends from providing some insight as to wineries we should visit.  Shout out to @ShanaRay, Michael Bryan of AWS, the Cribb’s (backdoor neighbor) and many others who will probably be offended because I couldn’t list them all… sorry!  Here’s a quick GoogleEarth view of what we have listed so far, though there will be many others squeezed in no doubt along the way.

We will be in Santa Rosa for the 2nd annual Wineblogger’s Conference this weekend (7/24-26) and then four days of nothing but tasting and touring the vineyards with some early morning road bike rides as well.  OH GLORIOUS DAYS!!!  Our hub is the Vintners Inn just north of Santa Rosa and if you’ve got a favorite winery, please comment and let us know… we may just decide to drop by and we’ll tell you how it was.

I know, this is a wine blog, but to satisfy the technology geek in me, I wanted to comment on a new tool I recently added to my site: Lijit as a recommendation from Andrea of Andy’s Goode Life.  I promise, I’ll get back to wine next time. 

Lijit is basically a search tool that allows your readers to search for and access content on your site and the sites of everyone in your social network (via blogroll) from one place.  It’s only been on my site for one week and I have not performed a super-detailed or formal analysis, I’ll leave that up to the gentlemen at VinTank.  These are just some thoughts I jotted down when playing around with the tool.  I would love to hear some other opinions.  By the way, you can access it from the sidebar to the right under the Links directory.

Pros:

1. Setup was pretty easy and they have a fairly extensive list of social networking sites they are able to integrate with.  Additionally, it automatically uses your blogroll to begin building your network the engine uses.  This is configurable via your user page on the Lijit site.

2. The biggest value I see is the ability to access other sites from one place, rather than having to visit each site and performing a search on each one.

3. It uses the Google Search engine (pro/con?) which also allows Google ads (pro/con?) on the search results page to be more targeted and reducing search “noise”.

4. The “Explore” feature is pretty cool, though, is a little disappointing graphically.  With all of the technology that is available (i.e. Silverlight) today, I expected more.  It displays your network in bubbles and you can click through your network and access sites that way.  This is a feature that could benefit from some additional features to create more value, like some integration with other blog tools or the display of additional information about those sites.

Cons:

1. It doesn’t seem to discriminate between the content of posts and text elsewhere on the site, like the sidebars.  So, for example, when I entered “Murphy Goode”, the results page showed all my posts, even though most weren’t about MG, because I referenced Murphy Goode on a link in my sidebar… not sure technically if there is an easy way to “fine tune” this?

2. You are required to select a tab on the results page for the views you want: Blog, Network, etc.  However, the default tab is configurable, so that might reduce the con-ness of this feature in my mind.

3. It was not easy to find the “Close” button for the Explore bubble graphic to get me back to my blog page.  I eventually found it way in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.  Also, see disappointment in graphical capabilities above.

4. In the Explore feature I could not find a way to get back to “home”, or my site after drilling-down several layers through the network, without drilling back up, which will be harder to do as your network grows.  Granted, I never read user manuals so maybe there is a way to do this, but I am pretty good with figuring technology out and this should be intuitive.

In conclusion, as I said before, I think the value here is really the capability of searching a network of sites from one place, which makes it very convenient for the reader.  Of course, the level of value will be dependent upon how deep a particular site’s network is as well.  Other than that, I think it has some room for improvement in the area of ease of use and GUI (see Explore).