The Adegga Blog

2010 has been a busy year so far for the Adegga Team! And because of this, our blog has been quiet lately from the lack of time we’ve had to post on it. But now, help is on the way!

We have asked fellow colleague and Catavino contributor Andrea Smith to help us out on the blog so you won’t miss out on any of the latest Adegga news.

Therefore, we’d like to welcome Andrea to the Adegga community as our new ghost writer.

For those of you who are not familiar with Andrea, she comes to us from the United States, growing up in Alexandria, VA, just ten minutes outside of Washington, DC. She’s been living in Lisbon, Portugal now for the past two years and has been a contributor for Catavino.net on Portuguese food and beverage for most of that time. Educated at The Culinary Institute of America, she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Culinary Arts and Hospitality Business as well as an Introductory Certificate from the Court of Master Sommeliers in 2004. Before moving to Portugal, Andrea had been working in the food and beverage industry for almost ten years with experience in just about every position in restaurants and hotels. She currently teaches Business English to professionals in Lisbon but in her free time and for her work in Catavino, she continues to research and study Portuguese wine and wine in general as well as the gastronomy culture of Portugal.

We hope then that you will continue to enjoy our Adegga Blog posts through the words of Andrea and her own stylistic touch that she will bring to them!

The Adegga team is feeling quite proud this week as one of our co-founders, André Ribeirinho (me*), has just been awarded as Wine Personality of the Year in Portugal by the DN based on the work that we’ve been doing in the last 3 years with Adegga and the AVIN.

Wine journalist Aníbal Coutinho wrote the newspaper article and ended it with a somewhat powerful message:

If you’re a wine producer or professional in the wine area and you’ve haven’t understood why I gave André Ribeirinho the award, make sure you’re not turning your back to the future of your business.

That certainly made us proud! Getting your work recognized is always good, but getting you’re worked praised like that is simply amazing!

An award is always a good time to look back so here’s a small recap of what we’ve done in the last 3 years.

Adegga

We launched Adegga publicly almost 3 years ago as one of the first social wine communities on the Web. After 3 years Adegga still maintains its original goal of helping people track the wines that are drinking (to help remember later) and to share that experience with their friends.

Adegga now has over 100.000 unique visitors every month and includes over 10.000 tasting notes written by its members. Adegga is available in 6 different languages translated by some of our members. This is the real power behind Adegga, the Community!

We believe that together we, as consumers, are changing the wine world by creating a new wine recommendation era where trust and conversation are more important than status.

More recently we started working together with wine producers who can use Adegga to gather their online fans, talk about their wines or launch a new wine. Cortes de Cima and Quevedo are two of wine producers already doing it.

At the end of 2009 we organized the first ever Adegga Wine Market which was a tremendous success bringing together over 150 peoples and 15 wine producers who’ve enjoyed tasting and talking about wine together in an unusual set full of nice sofas and music. We’re already planning the next one.

AVIN, an ISBN for Wine

One of the projects that has been keeping us awake at night is the AVIN. We created the AVIN to solve the problem of having one wine being identified by several different names. We believe that like with books, every wine should have a unique number. This will help consumers get more information out of each bottle of wine and help them make smarter decisions.

One year ago we created the concept of Dynamic Wine Labels allowing anyone with a camera-enabled mobile phone to read the label and access wine reviews, wine prices and a lot more information from anywhere. Now, over 1 million wine labels have been printed with a Dynamic Wine Label including an AVIN and a QRCode. Please visit the AVIN website for more information on this specific project and to learn how to get your own AVIN.

European Wine Bloggers conference

In 2009 we also gave a lot of time to another project. Together with Gabriella and Ryan Opaz and Robert McIntosh we helped organize the European Wine Bloggers conference in Lisbon. The conference was a major success, gathering over 160 people including wine producers, wine bloggers and wine writers from around the World. The 2010 edition will be announced soon and we’ll certainly be a part of it.

So were are we heading?

The last 3 years were nothing short of amazing! We expect 2010 to be another great year as we have so many exciting things almost ready to be announced (including a redesign!).

• We want Adegga to be even more social so we’ll be connecting even more with Facebook and Twitter.

• We also want Adegga to be open so we’ve developed an API and we’re currently testing it before launching.

• We’ve been also getting a lot of requests for a mobile application so we’ll be releasing an iPhone and an Android application.

Follow us everywhere
To keep in touch make sure you follow us on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook or subscribe our RSS. As always, you know our email so tell us about your ideas, bugs or just say hi!

* not too sound too much schizophrenic but André Ribeirinho and the author of this text are the same person. Me.

Since the beginning of this month we’ve been getting dozens of spammers visiting Adegga with the only intention of using our community to create backlinks to their own sites.

We’ve been relentless with these people and have spent some time deleting these spam accounts (usually in a matter of minutes) and making sure this content does not show up on the site.

We’ve also stop allowing links in bio profiles (removing all html tags from that content) and making the site rather useless to these people. Still, some spammers continue to add links (that can’t be seen). If you’re reading this I would recommend detailed attention while reading this Wikipedia entry on Hyperlinks.

If you see any of this bad content just let us know in the comments or through bugs@adegga.com. We’ll take good care of it.

The Adegga Blog is now fully integrated into the main site.

The blog exists mostly to talk about what is happening around the community and, for that reason, we feel that members should be able to participate in more integrated way, so we’ve changed a couple of things.

Adegga user accounts
When are you’re logged in on Adegga your comments will be signed with your username and link back to your profile.

Adegga design
The design of the blog is now the same as the main site making it easier to search wines, navigate, etc. without the need to jump to a different site.

We hope this move increases participation on the blog and helps sparkle the discussion within the community.

We’ve been featured in the first Wine Industry Social Media report and we’re very happy to see our hard work displayed with such respect. Adegga is identified as an innovative and forward thinking service and is (honoured to be) copied frequently by competitors.

It is obviously with great responsibility that we accept the VinTank’s recommendation as company to watch. We’ll continue our work to make Adegga one of the best wine social platforms out there!

VinTank’s Wine Industry Social Media report aims to explore the impact that social networks and social networking tools like Adegga are having on the wine industry.

I’m not going to mention everything that is written about us on the report as you can read it here but I would like to point out some things are think are good examples of the work we’ve been doing.

• Data cleanliness Est. 95% (due to the AVIN): we work very hard on this point. In fact one of the founders is solely responsible for making sure the wine information is correct and the AVIN is doing it’s magic.
• Innovative  and  a  forward  thinking: we are problem solvers focused on the end user. Everything we do is user-centered and aims to solve an existing problem. The solutions that we have come up with reflect exactly that approach and we think there’s still a lot that needs to be done.
• Some Things We Found that Stood Out: a lot of features were stood out in the report: Follow the producer, Activity updates, Social Share, Useful ratings, Who is blogging about this wine, Multi-score ratings, Adding wines, Where to buy, Adegga mobile and some more
• Wine unique coding through the AVIN: the IBSN for wine that we’ve been developing since the beginning of the project is about to enter a use and distribute phase where more people will be able to use it in many different ways. We listen very carefully to the reports feedback and agree that we need to need to collaborate with other entities to solve the problem as a group.
• Extensibility and the API: it’s not a secret anymore that we’ll be making easier to use Adegga information in different ways through our soon to be launched API (application programming interface)
• Multi-language: Adegga is currently available in 4 languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) and we’re working with our members to extend to other languages (next are German and Italian).

This report is one of the first deep looks into wine social media and should be used as a starting point guide into getting yourself acquainted with what is going on.

Last year, the European Wine Bloggers Conference happened in Rioja and we were there to attend the first international event for Wine Bloggers. This year it will happen in Lisbon, Portugal and Adegga will be sponsoring the event!

The idea behind the conference is to bring together bloggers of all backgrounds including: winemakers, wine writers, marketers, retailers and distributors from around the world. The theme for this year couldn’t be more appropriate: The Future of the Social Wine Brand.

The conference will take place between the 30th of October to the 1st of November 2009 and around these days I’ve been running around from place to place in an effort to help Ryan & Gabriella and Robert setup the second edition of the European Wine Bloggers Conference (EWBC) in Lisbon.

Ryan Opaz from Catavino was recently in Lisbon and I made a small film with him presenting the conference in a traditional Lisbon tram.

Catavino in Lisbon to announce EWBC from andrerib on Vimeo.

As we wrote our April fool’s post about Adegga.com buying Corkd.com we had no idea the reaction that it would get. We love Corkd (although we would like it to be further developed than it is).

Like with everything else in life we learned a couple of things with what happened.

• We had dozens of positive reactions to the news and it feels good to know that there’s lot of expectation and support for Adegga. Thank you!
• Even if it was April fools, it’s nice to get some link love from Techcrunch.
• There was a very interesting reaction from a German blogger that did an interesting analysis of the news. Good to know that the German market is watching us. We’ll be there soon.

Thank you for believing in us (no pun intended!). You make us work harder everyday.

Update: Yes, it was an April fool’s post! Everything is explained here.

For a long time people have been telling us that Adegga is a great community but it lacks the looks. We thought hard about creating a new design but decided for a much more interesting option.

We can now happily announce that we’ve reached an agreement to buy online wine community Corkd.com!

 

What will change?
Changes on Adegga and Corkd will happen in the next couple of weeks:

• Corkd design will slowly replace Adegga’s design.
• The name will remain Adegga.com (who names a wine site Corkd anyway?)
• Corkd blog will be merged with Adegga blog and we hope that together they’ll be more often updated.
• All wines on Corkd database will be moved to Adegga’s in order to improve quality and eliminate duplicates.
• All wines on Corkd database will also automatically get an AVIN, our unique code for wines.
• All wines on Corkd will finally show all the wine blogs that are talking about them.
• All wineries on Corkd will automatically get a Profile and a Premium Account.
• The Corkd community will finally be able to browse wines in French, Portuguese and Spanish.

As part of the agreement Gary Vaynerchuck, previous owner of corkd and host of the Web show Wine Library TV will come to Portugal in October to attend the next European Wine Blogger Conference.

While here he’ll be signing a couple of Portuguese wine bottles with his now trademarked tweet:
Not enough people are understanding that Portuguese wines are like twitter circa 2006.

We keep making small improvements to make adegga even better!

Better, Faster, Stronger
We’ve improved a lot of small details that will make navigating adegga so much faster. As an example our new homepage is loading 4 times faster and a typical wine page will load twice as fast as it used to. All thanks to the tips taken from this optimization best practices article of the performance team at Yahoo.

Homepage update (now with wine regions)
We’ve also updated the homepage with small design details and a new improved wine region navigation that lets you easily browse wine regions for each country. If you’re using Adegga from Portugal this is how it looks:

Share this wine
More and more people are bookmarking and sharing a wine from adegga on Twitter (btw, here’s our twitter account). So we’ve added something that will save you some time when sharing each wine. Using these buttons you can easily jump to the site of your choice with the url of the wine (sometimes with the wine name too). Besides Twitter and del.icio.us it also works on facebook, Google Bookmarks and Furl. (if you would you like us to add another service let us know).

iPhone icon
And last (but not least) as requested by Diogo we’ve added a specific icon for the iPhone. When you bookmark adegga on the iPhone you’ll be able to automatically use the typical adegga icon and then comfortably use our mobile version:

A little bit later than usual but here we are to wish you an splendid 2009 with lots and lots of wine (buying, drinking and selling)!

I have a couple of quick updates:

• We’ve spent December mostly fixing little bugs. After we launched the new homepage and change home to a new server we have have been ironing out a few issues here and there. If you see anything not working let us know via this feedback box!
• Christmas was crazy as usual as everyone is searching for wine online (isn’t wine a lovely gift!). We had a spike on traffic with a lot of new users joining the community. Welcome to you all!
• Our video is a bit delayed. Some people desperately want to participate but took a little longer to send their videos and made us a little late. No worries. A couple more days and it will come out! Promise.

I’ll be back soon with some exciting posts!