Montreal Tech Watch

Image by Dave Sideway, The Gazette

Vinismo, the newly launched wiki for wines, has been covered by the Montréal Gazette, where Roberto Rocha introduces it as the wikipedia for wines.

Evan Prodromou and Nicolas Ritoux introduced vinismo first at DemocampMontreal 3, I found it great and promised to a great future. However, Roberto Rocha brought some thoughtful comments about vinismo, echoed later by fagstein. In the article, a wine critic downplayed vinismo as it lacks authority, one argument I dismiss completely (cf wikipedia). Another critic was about subjectivity, as each wine lover would be most likely to have his own opinion about a wine. This might be a problem, and websites like corkd might be more useful to readers as it doesn’t try to synthetize information given by users. But wikitravel, another reference website started by Evan Prodromou, was successful even though travel destinations are also highly subjective.

I would say that in essence, I find Vinismo great, and they aren’t really any design flaws. What I am worried more is about the marketing, or the lack of thereof. For instance, if you search in Technorati, most people blogging about vinismo are the web people from Montréal, and this is just not enough. This is a sharp contrast from standoutjobs, where Benjamin Yoskovitz reaches almost every day to influential bloggers in human ressources, recruiting and startups, which is a great way to be recognized as an innovative startup in recruiting. I hope the Vinismo team is going to ramp up their promotion efforts in the next few months.