Steve Hooker's Radio Weblog: A Welsh boy stuck in the wrong country, struggling to get home

A breath of fresh air.

wine : New Zealand Wine News & Information: "News item (one of 4 for today): February is the month that a young person's fancy turns to chocolate. And big red wines. At least, the purveyors of chocolate and wine would like you to think that when Valentine's Day rolls around"
Here's one for the lads! At last I've found another weblog on the subject of wine. This is also available as a feed that you can add to your website and your Radio news feeds, which can be sent via email for your blogging ease. And it's 'just' another Manila site.

New Zealand though? Who'd like to be context provider for this sector?

I was talking about this 18 months ago magazines are boring only once a month, if only they could have spread themselves more easily into the internet, to build their brand around the user experience of the internet. All that brand spreading going to waste.

Now, it's too late, it's time for the individual to bring their POV to product categories, well, several dozen individuals, some doing it for love, some doing it for money. Always arguing. Gossiping. Linking. Building reputation, building love, exploration.

If you own a wine shop in the UK, start a weblog now. Ask all your friends to do the same. Join the blogs up, adopt an excellent a UK based delivery service, probably using Tesco's, ask a small fee for the recommendation via the paypal account they needed to join the community, and work the 'net building your reputation, and knowledge. And send offers via mobile phone, at about rush hour, for on that on the way home feeling . Thus, you don't even need to carry stock, though for that speciality wine and extra service, you can always do UK overnight delivery from your store.

Whatever, the trick will be in being the context provider, whether pay to join, or articles or wine lists by micro payment, selling tools and books, linking up suppliers with customers and taking a fee, there's lots to do in the wine world when you've built up reputation, knowledge, and brand. Once you've done that with your hobby, you've have people's attention, handy thing attention.

Suppose you could do the same thing with pizzas.

Take ages? About three months to build a local rep, brand and experience, a few ads in stuffy old printed mags, news paper specialist sections, and you're away UK-nationally. Thousands of channels will be controlled by you. Oh, you'll get competitors, and good job too! Think of all that traffic, all that discussion and debate, all under your roof. Each person could create as many channels as they liked. Red, white, bouquet, body, 1969...

Each page will have links to your world.

See also:

• The Standard: The Law of Recombinant Growth "Here's how it works: Every so often innovations come along that can be broken down into separate parts and recombined to create a host of new inventions."
• Release 1.0: Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices: "Under my gonzo marketing hat, I see this as an opportunity for companies to stop marketing altogether -- at least in the sense of marketing to and marketing at. Instead, personalization can be used to get genuinely personal, connecting members of these emergent micromarkets to each other. Do that, and -- shazzam! -- something different in kind results. People start talking, having conversations, telling stories."
• The Standard: Markets are Conversations. "Are you talking with your customers or at them? The first markets were markets. Not bulls, bears or invisible hands. Not battlefields, targets or arenas. Not demographics, eyeballs or seats. Most of all, not consumers."
  "Business-as-usual doesn't realise that Networked markets are not only smart markets; they're also equipped to get much smarter, much faster, than business-as-usual because it continues to conceptualize markets as distant abstractions [^] battlefields, targets, demographics [^] and the Net as simply another conduit down which companies can broadcast messages. But the Net isn't a conduit, a pipeline or another television channel. The Net invites your customers in to talk, to laugh with each other and to learn from each other."
• First Monday: The COMsumer Manifesto: Empowering Communities of Consumers through the Internet "This article offers a disruptive antidote to the hierarchical, closed, supply-system, explicit, knowledge-driven, "We Know What You Want" data mine world where many customers feel powerless. This is a world well beyond 1999's Net Worth and 2000's The Cluetrain Manifesto. Infomediaries are not just trustworthy agents which sit between the vendor and the customer, and markets are not just conversations. In this new world, communities sense needs, desires, and wishes for the future and create new data markets"

More quotes and links.