We’re pleased to announce the launch of the BrewPoll Home Brewing and Craft Beer News Site. After launching into the Web 2.0 with BrewWiki a few years ago and our BeerSmith blog the last few months, we’ve been fascinated with the way that many new social sites are able to find and promote the “best of the web”.
Home brewing and craft beer is no exception – in fact there are over 200 active beer and brewing blogs boasting over 20,000 articles. The web has become unimaginably large – a search of simple terms like “Home Brewing” brings up 1.8 million web sites.
How can the average homebrewer cut through the chaff? Sites like Digg.com, Slashdot and Newsvine are increasingly important sources of interesting (non-brewing) news and help readers zone in on quality content.
The concept behind all of these sites is that users can submit news articles to the site, and then vote on which articles they like best. The most popular articles are promoted to the front page. Digg, the largest, boasts millions of visitors each day. Unfortunately many social sites have little or no homebrewing presence.
We loved the concept behind sites like Digg, but could not find a suitable site dedicated to home brewing or craft beer. The time seemed right to create a Web 2.0 news site dedicated to homebrewing and craft beer. Here it is:
- http://www.brewpoll.com – BrewPoll Home Brewing and Craft Beer News Site
Anyone can vote on front page or upcoming stories by clicking on the “vote” count next to each story. The most popular posts from the upcoming stories page will be promoted to the front page for all to enjoy. Registered users may submit new stories via the “submit a new story” tab.
How can you Help?
We’ve seeded the site with just a few articles from our blog and the web. Visit the BrewPoll web site and vote for some upcoming stories or submit your favorite stories or web sites. We’re also looking for a few highly motivated volunteer moderators to help keep the spam down on the site.
We hope BrewPoll will help bring some of the “best of” sites to home brewers and craft beer fans. Let us know what you think about BrewPoll by leaving a comment or dropping us an email. If you want to add a voting button to your blog or site like the one on the right, visit this post on our discussion forum.
Hey, this is cool. I had a similar idea, but no where near the motivation to do it. Note that it’s really slow… Might be a problem if it gets traffic.
Thanks! I hope the site draws in some good quality content. I like your site as well – drop me an email if you want to exchange links. The speed is not bad on my end, but I am thinking of moving all of our sites to a higher end server in the next few weeks.
flaminio,
You must be psychic – there were over 1000 visits on day one so things did slow down a bit during peak hours. However it makes a great case for more people to submit stories to the site! I’ll move to a higher level host as soon as I can.
Great idea. Home Brew is so niche right now that it gets lost in those other sites. This is just what we need!
Hey Brad, I added you to my select few homebrewing links. Hope this gets popular. Looks great so far.
I thought you might enjoy two articles from other beer bloggers about BrewPoll:
http://www.fermentarium.com/content/view/177/55/
http://beerbits2.blogspot.com/2008/03/finally-digg-for-beer-and-homebrewing.html
http://www.beerguide.com.au/forums/index.php?automodule=blog&blogid=2&showentry=31
Just wanted to commend you on a job well done on this site. Looking forward to seeing it grow.
Now I just need to figure out how to access the forums over there..
Thanks for the kind comments! I’ve been very happy with the reaction to BrewPoll.com
The BrewPoll discussion forum is here:
http://www.beersmith.com/forum/index.php?board=17.0