Over the weekend, Andrew, from the fine Spittoon wine blog, responded in the comments to my Scurgy post with an opposing viewpoint:

“I am yet to be convinced that any of these sites have a future - I just dont think all this social networking malarky is going to catch on outside the geek community?”

What? How could he say such a thing? He’s even a post-Cluetrain blogger and doesn’t “get it”?

I have to say that Andrew does bring up a good point; in fact, one I’ve been concerned with in the past. Are all these Wine 2.0 sites doomed to be used by just us technology geeks? Will any of them find an audience outside the blogosphere? Am I just chasing windmills with these posts?

All good questions that are very difficult to answer right now. But let me present a quick case study here to try to illustrate why I think some of these Wine 2.0 site will catch on…

A couple years back there was this guy in the “fly-over States” who heard about podcasting on an online message board. Intrigued by the name, he did a Google search and found an example to listen to (this was back when a search on “podcast” returned only a few hundred results; today it’s about 226,000,000). From listening to his first podcast, he found another one, then one more when the light bulb went off. He should start his own podcast. Since there were none devoted to wine, this was the subject and he started in December of 2004. This chain of events would never had taken place if not for social media; first via a message board and later, a podcast (or three). One thing led to another and a couple years later there are thousands listening to this podcast and reading this blog. Not all of these people are “geeks” and I would speculate that not all of the 15,000 people who listen to Grape Radio are not geeks either (at least technology geeks).

So this is a long way of saying that I think some of these sites have a good chance to build an audience outside of tech geeks. It will just take some time. Let’s check back in a few months from now and revisit these questions.

OK, I admit it; I’m both a wine and technology geek, so filter my musings through this disclaimer