24 July 2007 is the fourth birthday of Wikitravel, the free travel guide that I and my wife Michele Ann Jenkins started on July 24, 2003.
It's been a long and complicated road, but I'm really proud of all the work Wikitravellers have done over these last four years. The project has gone from being a pretty-good idea to being one of the definitive travel resources on the Web. Winning the Webby Award for Best Travel Site this year was a real recognition of that trajectory.
I'm wondering what 24 July 2008 will bring... it will be interesting to see.
tags: wikitravel wiki travel wikiversary 24july2007
Vinismo
It's only partly a coincidence, then, that today I'm launching, with my friend Niko, a new Open Content project dedicated to demystifying an even more complex and byzantine world: wine. Tonight we're demoing the site at DemoCampMontreal3, so it's as good a time as any to throw open the doors:
http://vinismo.com/
We don't pretend to be wine experts or even connoisseurs. We're just two guys who like to drink wine and want to learn more about it. Ward Cunningham once said that wiki link is a great way to ask a question. We want to share the learning experience with people of all levels of expertise.
We think that working together with our friends and family, with other Internet users, and with the public at large, we can create a detailed, readable, useful wine guide for people at any level of expertise. Our liberal Creative Commons license means that the guide is Free -- free for anyone to copy, modify, or publish in any medium.
I need your help to make this project a success. If you can, I'd really appreciate if you could help us out with one or more of the following tasks:
- Please sign up to use our site at, and create a user page describing yourself.
- Drop us a note in the Wine Bar letting us know what you like and don't like about the site.
- Try adding some information about your favorite wines, wineries, wine regions or wine styles! It doesn't have to be perfect -- every little bit counts!
- Please forward this info to people you know who might be interested in Vinismo. They don't have to be experts to be interested in wine.
- If you have a blog, please post a link to our new site on it!
- If you use a social bookmarking tool, like del.icio.us, please add us to your list!
- If you use digg.com, please vote for our site there: http://digg.com/software/Open_Content_wine_guide_launches
- If you use reddit.com, please vote for our site there: http://freeculture.reddit.com/info/296au/comments