![]() ![]() So what's in it for the pros? They don't necessarily lose money or influence. This is the quintessence of what journalism wonks love to call the pro-am model. So CellarTracker's strength is providing that focal point for almost all you might want to know - a document of a wine tasted by different palates over time, what LeVine calls "fresher data points" than a one-time review, with the option to access market-moving data. Add to that a handful of other pro and semipro critics, plus 22,000 citizen reviewers, and the chance to access all that data in one place, and the potential becomes clear. They allow their own paid subscribers to access their reviews on CellarTracker pages. Burgundy expert Allen Meadows signed on last fall, and critic Stephen Tanzer was an early adopter in 2005. Robinson (a Chronicle contributor) sharing her professional criticism is just the latest addition to CellarTracker's hive mind. For all the florid wine prose that swells our hearts, the one thing that justifies a pay model - no different than in the financial world - is what moves markets. That has a value not covered by blogs, which, we're still being told, are going to put me and every fellow paid critic out of a job.īut blogs are a publishing tool they largely traffic in the same writing for which wine writers have gotten paid (or not) since the days of Thomas Jefferson. (Snooth's five-point system instead of the 100-point lingua franca, plus an overly fussy interface, make it a harder sell.)īut CellarTracker takes crowd-sourcing reviews a step beyond the Yelps and Zagats by allowing popular opinion to share space with informed expert opinion - without, I'd argue, diminishing the expert value and without sacrificing intellectual property. Other sites, notably, have taken on crowd-sourced reviews with less success. The cellar-management stuff isn't what makes CellarTracker revolutionary, though it's not shabby that its database contains 1.19 million reviews. ![]() LeVine still runs a one-man show, though he's hoping to add to the ranks this year. About 40 percent of those active users have voluntarily ponied up cash for premium features. CellarTracker has 90,000 registered users, half of whom actively use it to track their cellars. "We were all checking out what the other person had opened the day before, what they thought about it," he says. It was born out of his desire to take the spreadsheets that geeky types often used to track their wine bounty and apply open-source principles. ![]() LeVine developed the technology as an off-hours project when he was a Microsoft project manager. ![]()
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