I stumbled across a mention of data-scraping in wine-media maven @RickBakas's Twitter stream tonight. Being who & what I am, the intersection of two of my passions meant I had to dig further.
As a disclaimer, though, let's just say that my "contributions" to wine's social media dimension has been slim. I normally watch Wine Library TV via podcasts (and thus qualify as a "lurker," and I had a very dusty account on the probably soon-to-be-defunct Corked.com wine review site. The vast majority of the wine I consume is homebrew, so I'm even more of a misfit in a world that probably has Coke vs. Pepsi type squabblings between devotees of Sancerre and fans of Puilly Fume *.
Long story short: I don't have a horse in this race.
So. The backstory is that there's a website called CellarTracker. It, from what I can see from a superficial perusing, allows those who have too many wines to remember to track the wine in their cellar--presumably before it becomes vinegar from age. Additionally--and this is the juicy part--it's basically a database of wine-tasting notes, plus other amenities you'd expect from a social website.
Then there's this other website called Snooth. It's also about wine. It's admittedly prettier, though much stalkier ("Hello La Crosse wine lover."), and does a reasonable job of impersonating a wine magazine. As part of its aggregation backend, however, Snooth trolls the web, looking for wine-related content, presumably ranks its relevance according some algorithm, and then moshes & categorizes (tags) it into something its users can use to search for relevance.
There's certainly a value-add in the filtering process, assuming that the false positives and false negatives are absolutely and ruthlessly minimized. That's been Google's bread-and-butter for a decade now, and (remembering what search was in the 90s) I'll be the last to complain about that business model. Snooth might have other ethical issues to contend with, but blatantly "stealing" data isn't one of them.
Yesterday, a windstorm-in-a-wineglass arose with the charges that Snooth had been scraping tags (i.e. the descriptive categories) from CellarTracker, in violation of their agreement not to do the same after the companies ended their partership in 2007. I'm sure my gentle reader will be shocked to learn that oenophiles can talk trash as well as anyone else, although perhaps with somewhat better sentence construction--probably comes from having to learn all that French, I suspect. ;-)
Today's development was an apology with explanation of how the oversight occurred from Snooth's Philip James. It's quite well done--to the point where it would do well as a fair example for college business and marketing majors to absorb. To her credit, @JancisRobinson (Master of Wine, travel maven and all-around class act) tweeted the apology to her 55K+ followers. Hopefully that'll tone down any lingering rhetoric.
But in the aftermath, my gut says that this is just a taste--a sip, if you will--of what's to come. Notice in this case that the bone of contention wasn't the wine reviews themselves, it was the meta-data--i.e. the thing that makes the web more than just a collection of single words. As more and more folks cross-post, recommend, rank, re-tweet, comment, follow, friend, fan, etc., the meaning will be found in the meta-data--the underlying relevance & whatever meanings can be teased from those connections and groupings. And that's even without the extra dimensions of geolocation.
Having content worth linking to, favoriting or whatever still matters--no question. But the money's in the meta.
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* The Sancerre and Puilly Fume wine-making regions are basically across the river from each other in France's Loire valley, and both are made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape. But in wine as in religion, the narrowest differences make for the widest schisms. Or at least it sure seems that way...
