It’s crunch time here at the Spanish office of the European Wine Bloggers Conference. Every day a new issue, a new question, and the realization that we forgot to do something! That combined with a now ever expanding desire from non-delegates to join the already full ranks, is leading to us working long hours and wondering how we keep Catavino alive. All that said, we are having fun and learning a lot. The best part though is that this conference looks to be shaping up nicely and will lead to some new conversations that need starting. I’m sure the US based conference 2 months later will also lead to great new opportunities too, and we hope that both prove to be models for what wine bloggers can do to change the wine world.

So today, we want to point out a few things that we have been wanting to talk about but just haven’t found time to put fingers to keys yet!

Vinus TV Records the first EWBC for Posterity

For all of you who can’t make it to Rioja for the Conference, and for all you readers out there who are just curious as to what a bunch of wine bloggers might do if put in one room together, well don’t worry, VinusTV is here to help. During the entire conference, they will be recording and interviewing participants for you to see live. They have promised to try to even have the 3 roundtables on the web by the end of the day on the 30th. So though you won’t be there, you can participate. We’ll also have many people twittering away and I want to put up a live chat room on the …

Tomorrow is RSS Awareness Day! But do you know what RSS stands for? Do you use RSS to make your online life easier? Do you realize that if you surf online and do not know what RSS is, you’re missing a considerable amount on the web?

Today, Catavino is taking a break from wine to bring you a short intro on the merits of RSS. If you are reading this in your “feed reader” you may want to scroll onto another story and/or tag this one to email from your reader who is less in the know. For those of you who don’t know what I just said or what I was talking about, you are probably not reading this in your feed reader, and you probably are starting to get annoyed with us.

OBJECTIVE OF RSS AWARENESS DAY

As taken from the RSS Awareness Website: What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits, and that number is growing slowly over time. By creating the RSS Awareness Day and celebrating it every year we should be able to get the general public exposed to this format, hopefully increasing the usage of RSS feeds and related applications among Internet users.

RSS dates back to 1995 when Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group created something called the Meta Content Framework (MCF). I can’t pretend to tell you what this means, but I can say this was the launching point for several other evolutions in RSS technology which included people …

I love talking to people who are off the “grid”, or at least off my grid. Sadly, and happily, I’m plugged into the internet more than most. Consequently, I have a drastically different view on Internet norms. For me, Twitter is an extension of my vocal chords, Gmail is an extra storage place for my brain, and Catavino is a soapbox for which I shout out from. And as a result of this online culture, a new language has been born. There are new verbs such as:
To Google: To search for something on the internet
To Blog: To write about something and publish is on the web
To surf: To wander about the web, often with the help of tools such as Stumble upon.

Interestingly, a few nights ago, we had some friends over for dinner and an interesting topic surfaced. Evidently, one of our friends had just left his first comment on a blog. I know most of you will at this point be thinking, “where’s this guy been the past 5 years?” But it turns out us web 2.0 junkies are still the minority, and the interactive nature of the new internet is still very novel to many. Feeling confident, my friend left a comment about a woman’s overly happy disposition on her video blog. What followed from that “comment” completely caught him off guard. At first, he was called a ‘troll’ by a fellow reader who didn’t like the fact he challenged this woman’s ‘life is beautiful’ attitude. Second, the blogger, in this case, a vlogger, responded, whereby creating …