Today, I had a friend email me two links. The first was to an article in Techcrunch on a site called Aboutus.org. The second was to Catavino’s listing on AboutUs.org. Let’s just say that I was absolutely shocked to see all of my “Who is Catavino” information alongside our “About Us” text. At first, I wanted to believe that they had been nice enough to find my site and list it for its quality content. But alas, spiders and scrapers seem to have done the majority of the work. While there was nothing on the site that a person with a link to the “Whois” database couldn’t find, I still had to change some of the information that was impertinent to my listing.

I am posting this not because it has a lot to do with wine, but because while I was reviewing and rating other wine blogs listed, I noticed that the information seemed un-related to their sites and the phone numbers provided were probably not intended to be on their homepage. With Tim at Winecast talking so much about wine/web 2.0, I’m becoming more aware and savvy as to what is occurring on the Internet. AboutUS is using Mediawiki, some may say the ulitimate in Web 2.0 which basically allows anyone to change information as they see fit. Currently it is ‘open’ to editing which might cause problems in the future for sites who walk a controversial line in their writing, not to mention allow for advertising and media manipulation.

It appears, Aboutus has money backing their site, which could result in an extremely useful directly in the future. For example, it employs a tagging system that allows me to see other sites that are talking about certain subjects. And because it’s not limited to wine, I can find Spanish wine articles listed on some sites that I have not seen before. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll actually use it in the future but the rest of you might want to at least make sure your page’s listing is to your liking.

Ryan

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