Anecdotal: Even with Web Browsing enabled in the Options menu, it continues to report that the feature doesn't exist and cites the September 21 cut off. Odd!
> To put it in Bill Burr's words,"It's a big CLUB. And YOU AIN'T IN IT."
Pretty sure that's actually a George Carlin line, from a relatively famous routine of his. Many, many clips, but here's a random one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUaqFzZLxU
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It's a Paul Smith store and it wasn't intentional (though it has since been embraced for what it is by the brand), per a similar piece last month in the Ringer "Can Real Life Compete With an Instagram Playground?":
> Late one Wednesday morning in July, a crowd of tourists began to form on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Their location of interest was the Paul Smith store, but not what was in it. The large modernist building, with its sunny corner location, single rectangular window, and striking bubblegum-pink painted wall, happens to make an excellent portrait backdrop.
> Though the menswear designer has never commented on the phenomenon, it’s safe to say that he did not imagine his California-pink shoebox would one day function as the site for thousands of amateur photo shoots. (Especially since it does not appear to have improved sales at his store.) Nevertheless, the Paul Smith brand appears to have recognized its power as a free marketing opportunity.
Want to be clear I am not criticizing this article as derivative of The Ringer piece. There are a lot of articles about purposefully Instagramable places, especially the 'museum' of Ice Cream.
I've been a happy paying sub of Stratechery since October 2015, and would be glad to discover that subs have 'almost surely grown exponentially since [November 2014].' Just wondering what your basis for that assertion is? Looking at (admittedly poor) proxies like Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and estimate domain visits from various sources I don't see any sort of exponential growth...though to be fair the sources I am looking at go back to mid-2015. Again, poor proxies and would be happy to know Ben is doing this well.
Agree user reviews do prevent their own issues. One of those linked articles is about the confusion over the meaning of 'dry' in the contexts of sweetness and tannins.
> ...probably best way is still ask some good wine buyer, describe what you like and he might recommend wines he likes that loosely fits your description.
Best advice I've gotten/give is find an importer/distributor (eg Kermit Lynch) and rely on their selections.
Agree that using marketing descriptions provided by the winery isn't the best approach. It would be much more useful if the data used stuck to just the reviews (though _which_ reviewers are used is its own issue):
> A Quid network shows 3,380 nodes, where each node represents a description and review of a single bottle of Bordeaux-style red wine from Wine.com.
FWIW, this is a topic we've explored in a few ways at VinePair:
BrewDog is an increasingly bizarre case study in the microbrewery/crowdfunding space. Their 'Equity For Punks' money- raising efforts received a wide range of legal opinions in different jurisdictions.
Pretty sure no one expected -- given their very loud anti-'sell-out' rhetoric -- that they would sell a 22% stake for £100M to a private equity firm (TSG Consumer Partners) and actually deliver a serious return to said 'punks.'
> When the solution of providing astronauts with a ballpoint pen that would work under weightless conditions and extreme temperatures came about, though, it wasn’t because NASA had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars (inflated to $12 billion in the latest iterations of this tale) in research and development money at the problem. The “space pen” that has since become famous through its use by astronauts was developed independently by Paul C. Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co., who spent his own money on the project and, once he perfected his AG-7 “Anti-Gravity” Space Pen, offered it to NASA.
A month ago I dove into the topic of "Craft" vs "Crafty" to produce a map of the actual owners of "craft" beers as well as other brands that are marketed as local/independent.
It's been updated four times as it was tough to sort through some of the confusion and obfuscation in marketing, even with the benefit of having had dug through SEC filings, the COLA registry at TTB, and other sources. FWIW, I was contacted for direct clarification from one of the companies indirectly called out in this piece (Kona/Craft Brew Alliance).
All that said, I'd argue that association (and particularly a lack of care about such an association by many, many consumers whether or not they know about it) is less interesting than the advantages of being purchased/created by a macro brewer, such as distribution and how that plays out in the 3-tier system in the US.
To paraphrase what b1twise wrote below I would say do not do as Google says when common sense, lots and lots of case studies, and practitioner consensus say otherwise.
Sure...you can move it to a subdomain and if all goes well, great. If not you can cite a Matt Cutts video to say who could have known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk
If the organic traffic matters then trust people who are actually affected (http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomai...) and figure out another (yes, much more involved) way to deal like reverse proxying if you have other demands to contend with.
Very cool! This is like the beer version of WineGlass (http://wineglassapp.com/)! They managed to get ratings from CellarTracker via private access to their API (like Beer Advocate they don't offer anything publicly), so from the start that had access to the largest? library of user generated wine ratings on the web.
Are you blending user ratings with the ratebeer ratings in screenshots, or keeping them separate?
Wineglass has a feature I thought was pretty neat -- letting you know whether or not the price was 'fair for a restaurant' given typical industry markups. Perhaps not as applicable to beer, but could be a cool feature. And then you could surface 'bars with the best deals on beers you'll love.'
I'm in online wine media, so not as familiar with the beer space but it seems like lots of areas for collaboration (eg Nextglass, Untapped, BeerMenus.com as a fallback for OCR fails)
P.S. I understand the need to monetize, but having used heavily/played with dozens of apps in the wine/beer/liquor space, both free and paid, its rare to see random iAds (so far Target.com, some casino game install ad, and another casino game install ad. Perhaps the revenue is worth it but feels like there are much more interesting ways to monetize (native ads in terms of featured beers/all sorts of brewery/bar partnerships) than that sort of junky ad...
