A milestone at 500, albeit Chicago-style
Just noticed that I’ve racked up over 500 votes now on Local Wine Events, which bills itself as the World’s Largest Food & Drink Calendar. What’s also cool about the site is that it lists, as of today, 240 wine- and food-related blogs.
As with nearly all of the images I attach to my posts, you can click to expand them and mouseover them to find a hidden infomorsel. If you’re hopelessly snowbound or queued in an air terminal and have some time to kill, then I betcha can’t mouseover just one!
Now I realize 500 votes doesn’t hardly compare my blog to the likes of Alder Yarrow’s Vinography.com, currently ranked Number 6, or Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV, which is currently ranked Number 3.
Alas, no: I’m dwelling somewhere down around Number 40. At one time, though, I was ranked around Number 10. But many wine blogs have joined the ranks since I registered on the site about a year ago.
Nevertheless, I have somehow mustered 500 votes! And I sure appreciate y’all choosing to vote my blog to that lofty perch.
It’s a curious thing, though, to see a whole bunch of German blogs listed on Local Wine Events (at least I think they’re German). Most of these blogs seem to be attracting a great number of vote-happy fans because they’re steadily advancing in the ranks above my listing as well as many other blogs whom I would regard as having much more pull, stats-wise.
But hey, this is Chicago-style voting, which means that you can vote every day for any of these blogs if you want to. Therefore, the ranking that you see on Local Wine Events does not even remotely correlate to the algorithmically-ranked statistics shown by AlaWine.com’s 100 Top Wine Blogs and others. In other words, voting for your favorite wine blog on Local Wine Events is purely freestyle mayhem.
Which, being that it’s not 20th Century Chicago politics, is actually kind of fun.
While I suspect many of the blog authors themselves are voting every day for their own blogs on multiple machines with separate IP addresses (and you know who you are!), I believe the real reason a reader should vote for a blog is because he or she enjoys reading it, finds it a place to return to regularly, or - in an ideal world if you’re a listed wine blogger - is a real fan who is compelled to add my blog to their list of favorites and vote and vote and vote for it over and over again.
Gee, could I be hinting at something? 
Well, perhaps I am. So, at the risk of being perceived as a self-ingratiating chest-thumping so-n’-so, I invite my readers to VOTE HERE OFTEN if you’ve a mind to. Or, you can just click that hard-to-miss and annoying little flashing CLICK ME over there in the right sidebar [since removed - too annoying, even for me!].
And then, by golly, you can even tell your friends! Especially if you find appeal in all things winehiking. After all, it would be kind of a neat social experiment to see how many fans The Winehiker truly has out there in the Great Blogosphere. (At least one or two, I suspect.)
OK, enough proselytizing. We now bring you back to our regularly scheduled programming. Have a happy Fall weekend!
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November 4th, 2007 19:23
Congrats on the milestone! I know the trials and tribulations of blogospherean popularity (is that a word?), so I can appreciate how sweet this little victory must be . . . those German sites notwithstanding.
For my part, I love your blog and I use it as a planning resource before heading to the wine country. Usually I stay in Healdsburg, one of my fave spots on earth, so I poke around to see what’s what in and around Sonoma and the Russian River Valley.
Congratulations!