Open letter to web hackers

posted by philip in Snooth

On Wednesday someone tried to scrape Snooth. Now, this happens all the time - Google crawls our site daily, downloading hundreds of thousands of pages each day for example. Hundreds of other search engines do it too. However, this traffic was coming from a source we didn’t recognize, it was also coming in way faster than anything we’d experienced to date.

After some digging it turned out to be an anonymizer service that was using over 1,000 different servers to pound our site - this slowed down our page load times for legitimate users. We quickly found an innovative way to block them, and our site speed returned to normal.

Snooth is the world’s largest wine database - the site has the most wines, reviews, images, winemakers notes and wine related content in the world, so I understand why other sites would want access to the content. However, we offer an API that makes it easier than crawling/scraping us.

The API is a better way to get at our data - its a dedicated set of servers, so you’re not fighting over resources with our users. It’ll also stay current. Instead of scraping the data and seeing it go out of date in a month, you can use the API to collect images, reviews, notes and wine information. Best of all is the prices - by using the API you can keep the inventory items and prices up to date.

We launched the API in November and so far over 50 companies have launched or are building applications that run off the Snooth API. In addition to our 500,000 strong monthly audience the extended network of users that we reach via these API partnerships brings the total audience to over 2,000,000 users per month.

So, next time you are thinking you want some wine data, please go take a look at our API instead of scraping us. It’ll give you better data, and we won’t be trying to throttle your access to protect our users.

Would you like to be a Voice of Snooth?

posted by philip in Snooth

A few months ago we released the group pages, which created centralized pages for every region, winery, store, attribute and grape in our database. The volume of analysis, content, images and discussion on these pages has been growing very rapidly and it was clear that these pages were getting to the stage that they would benefit from human curation.

I’m pleased to say that, as of today, every page of this type will either have a curator, or if it doesn’t, and you have an interest in the subject, you can apply to curate the page, and to create a micro site around the content you are most passionate about.

Here’s an example of how it will work:

I live in New York city and like NY state wines, so I go to the group page to see what I can learn. Lenn Thompson of the NY wine blog Lenndevours is the curator.

If I roll over his profile I can learn a bit more about him, or send him a message.

I like what I see, so went ahead and followed the New York group. One of the advantages of this is that Lenn can keep me, and the other followers, up to date with recent news and events, and the followers can even communicate with each other via the comment board, further down the page.

Group pages aren’t limited to being curated by professionals, if there’s a region, grape, winery or store that you love (even if you’re not from there or an official representative) then you’d be the ideal curator.

If you see a page on a topic you like, just check to see if it’s been claimed already. If its still unclaimed, go ahead and claim it - we’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Snooth / Zemanta Integration

posted by philip in Snooth

Something for the bloggers out there - Zemanta is a neat service that helps bloggers add relevant links to their content, and I’m pleased to announce that Snooth is one of their official content partners.

Lets say I want to blog about a wine I had recently. The Ponzi Vineyards Pinot Noir 2006 from Willamette Valley, Oregon, is a good example. Zemanta is a blog plug in that reads the content that I’m writing and then gives me the option to link to key phrases (Ponzi Vineyards, Willamette Valley, Pinot Noir etc). You can choose to add links to Snooth, Wikipedia, or other sites - see the image below.

OK, so in this case I decided to link the winery name, grape name and region name. Just three quick clicks and Zemanta did all the work.

The tool also helps suggest related articles as well as shows you a library of images you can access - this pulls data from multiple sources, but includes bottle images from the 300,000 we have on Snooth (see image below).

Zemanta is another service that leverages Snooth’s API, and part of how we extend the reach of our data. This is an important note, as wineries, retailers and others spend their time adding and curating content on Snooth. In return for that time, we do our best to insure that in addition to the 500,ooo users who get to see it directly on Snooth, there’s a wider network of 10 million people who get access to the work.

I know a lot of bloggers that use Zemanta, and many wine bloggers have asked us and Zemanta to integrate Snooth. I’m glad we were able to get this launched so quickly. As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback.

Snooth / Mashlogic Integration

posted by philip in Snooth, Partnerships

I’m happy to announce that we just launched our integration with Mashlogic.

Mashlogic is a service that allows you to browse the web and to always see the information that’s most relevant to you.The following examples will illustrate just how useful it can be:

Lets say you are browsing on a wine ecommerce site and you want to check if the price they are selling the wine for it actually a good one, Mashlogic allows you to simply hover over the wine name and a popup will appear that gives you links and prices of the wines on Snooth. Particularly useful in this case as it looks like I can save an additional $2 per bottle on that Tin Roof Merlot by shopping via Snooth.

The other great use is if you are reading about a wine on a wine blog or on an online newspaper - great content, but they don’t tell you where you can buy the wine. Well, just mouse over any of the wine names and Mashlogic will do its think, quickly showing you the matching wines. With just one click you can go to Snooth and find the store that has it the cheapest, or the closest to you. See the example below with SFGate’s Top 100 wine list:

Mashlogic has created a special Snooth version of the plugin, available here. Its Firefox only at the moment,but, if that’s your browser give it a try and let us know how it works out for you.

Are your tasting notes safe?

posted by philip in Snooth

Mark wrote a post earlier today announcing that we’d released a tool which allows you to import your tasting notes. This, second to the iPhone site, was our most requested feature and I’m glad we released it. It allows you to import any notes that you have at home, or, with your permission, will help you copy your notes from another service and add them to Snooth. The import process is simple, fast and accurate - in real time our servers analyze the wines in your notes, inventory and wish list and match them against database and when its complete we send you an email letting you know.

We’ve been adding the most requested sites and will work on adding new sites/formats as they are suggested.

This is an important tool because in many instances your notes are not as safe as you believe them to be. Your reviews, cellar inventory and wish list can represent hundreds of hours of work and a lifetime of collecting. These are your content, your memories, an accurate representation of what’s in your cellar, and, in the event that you’d ever need to make an insurance claim, for example, valuable evidence. You trust this content to your computer, or to a service and you need to make sure that its secure.

In the last few weeks alone, we’ve seen wine sites hacked, no longer support the ability for you to export your content, and even lose user data. Other wine sites are run off of servers in the developers house and are very susceptible to single points of failure. If you keep your data on a computer at home, this also runs the risk of hard disk failure / power surge / theft etc.

At Snooth we treat your data with the utmost respect and care. That’s why we have triple daily backups to locations several thousand miles apart. All our servers have the data replicated across multiple hard disks, so if one fails the other can continue. Snooth’s data is run off of over 15 servers, which keeps it fast, but more importantly keeps it secure.

I’d recommend that you ensure that you have multiple backups of whats important to you, as hard disk failure isn’t a case of ‘if’, its a case of ‘when’, and with services losing data, simply trusting a site to manage it for you isn’t sufficient. If you check the Terms of Service for the sites you use, you’ll generally find that by uploading your data you immediately sign all your rights away - if they lose the content, there’s no comeback, as it was their content the moment you uploaded it.

We take a different view, because to us, your content will always remain your content, and our Terms of Use reflects that.

“For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in and to your Submissions…You may delete all or any part of your Submissions at any time using the tools provided by Snooth and the license granted to Snooth shall terminate upon your deletion of such Submissions from the Site.”

You can trust your data to Snooth, but to make things quadruply safe, you can export a copy of your reviews from us by clicking here and then clicking on the “download your ratings” icon, that lets you export your content at any time.

Everest

posted by philip in Snooth

I don’t talk about this too much, but in 2003 I climbed Mount Everest. My friend and climbing partner broke his leg at 28,000 feet. As a result no one in our expedition reached the summit, but we did get him down safely in what became the worlds highest altitude rescue.

I’d set out to become the youngest Briton to climb the North Face of Everest and had joined a small independent expedition with just 5 other climbers. After 60 days on the mountain we ended up with a 120 hour rescue that ended with a broken leg, broken ribs, dysentery, frostbite leading to several digits being amputated as well as several fatalities and multiple medals of valor.

The reason I’m writing this here (and now) is that I gave a talk last night to the Fortnightly Club of Westchester and wanted to share the slides. This is less a presentation and more a slide show, and there are some great images, so please enjoy.

If you want to learn more about the expedition itself, here are some news articles about the event:

• BBC News article - Everest on his knees 
• Manchester Evening News - Amazing Escape of Everest Survivor
• Everest News - Everest North Side Expedition ‘03

There’s also a documentary in production - I’ll post when that’s released as well, as you get to hear me recount the story for about 15 minutes of the hour long piece.

Click here to download the slide show (45mb). Finally, if you want to see it in the “Tilt Viewer” format - click here.