Yahoo!!!: Girl Meets Grape!
I had been wondering how the new Yahoo Food Page was going to handle wine. I figured they’d farm out the content to other information sources…after all that’s sort of their base business, delivering other people’s information. Food and Wine Magazine is a big player at the site as well as providing much of the wine info they provide.
However, it does seem they’ve hired a person to blog on wine: Bonnie Graves is writing the "Girl Meets Grape" wine blog on Yahoo Food.
Graves is a sommelier who has been the go-to wine expert at restaurants such as Jean-Georges and Spago. Today she’s a consultant…and blogger.
I’m not sure how we are defining "blog" these days. I guess it’s just a site that has entries on it in which the most recent is near the top and the rest descend down the page. Girl Meets Grape doesn’t include the usual accoutrement one finds on most other blogs: archiving by category or date, links to other blogs, etc.
I hope I’m not coming off as territorial and sounding like I’m saying, "hey, this isn’t really a blog". After all, you can comment on Girl Meets Grape. It just doesn’t look like most blogs.
That said, Ms. Graves CAN write and her sommelier background (which means an educator’s background) comes through in her writing. To-date her posts are purely educational and will be of use to the huge number of folks that will find her by virtue of sitting on the Yahoo food page. She’s currently got a three part story on corks and screwcaps and a two part post on the important subject of what to drink with the thanksgiving day meal.
Most of the overbloated publications on the ‘net are discovering that “blog” is a buzzword for the lemmings. Check any newspaper online and you’ll see their regular columnists are also writing “blogs” now (though the content and structure is usually the same as their column). At least “Girl Meets Grape” includes a major blog feature: the comments function.
I think many longtime blog readers know the difference between a “real” blog and a corporate-forced pseudo-blog: independence.
Don’t worry Tom, you don’t sound territorial … in fact it doesn’t even sound like sour grapes!
“two part post on the important subject of what to drink with the thanksgiving day meal.”
Good Lord….the pressing issue of our day…
Three words: no RSS feed. Perhaps Yahoo will figure out that a feed is a good thing and will drive people (who otherwise choose not to use Yahoo as their reader) to Yahoo.
No trackbacks either, for that matter.
Although it’s a bit of a lite version, it is indeed a “blog” as the content is syndicated via an RSS feed, posts are in reverse chronological order and comments are open. My only gripe is that make it difficult to subscribe outside of Yahoo’s reader, but this is a small point. Seems like a positive development to me.
BTW, the feed is http://food.yahoo.com/blog/girlmeetsgrape/feed/rss2/
Hi Tom,
I felt a similar way when Eric Asimov started his blog at the NYT but can’t complain now since it’s simply a very good read.
This however is different. In the David and Goliath story Goliath was never a babe. Why can’t they play fair?
tom, you are absolutely being territorial and i’m very surpsied….
there are no rules for a blog and i would have thought you would know that…i’m a political junkie and have been reading political blogs for years…there is no official format, nor any real reason for one…
internet blogs are a free forum, and there appeal is the intimacy and candor of a real-time candor…who cares how a blogger archives or sorts their posts?
bottom line, if “girl meets grape” has a voice that finds an audience, more power to her…and her forum is sure as hell a blog!
hi Tim – glad you could find it, and thanks for the link, which works just fine!
If it is on that page somewhere, however, I don’t see it. And normally all you have to do is put the blog URL into NewsGator and it will find the feed nicely 99% of the time. But that didn’t work either. The average shmoe doesn’t know where else to look…
And it’s funny, but I think that for most of the writers that I knew as columnists first and bloggers second, that I like their blogs better…!
I think she’s hot.
She’s not THAT hot. Tom would probably look just as good if he let his hair grow that long.