Have you ever found yourself on a beautiful summer Saturday afternoon… in front of a computer… posting on an internet message board? Wait it gets better.
On a message board, no a single discussion thread, very specific to your particular interest? An interest your friends may consider kind of an obsession? Do you find yourself getting really fired up and just posting a whole bunch of stuff that probably few folks outside of that inner circle will ever read? Have you ever done that?
It goes down like this… have you ever just found yourself on a website called Coffee Geek, in the forums, posting in Regional>>United States East>>Subject: Do you dare rate Pittsburgh’s coffee bars?
I’m crazy- and I just spent an hour on there. I just keep getting sucked in. Damn you coffeegeek.
By the way- that discussion thread started on Sat Feb 3, 2007 at 1:50pm- back when we were still calling this outfit “caffe intermezzo”. It has spawned 468 responses and 90,695 views as of this moment. I think 90 thousand of those views were by like 10 people, but that’s still a lot of views!
The nice thing about that thread in particular is that I think by being involved in it, many of the shops have gotten better or at least honed their skills and many of the non-shop folks have been able to spread word of mouth about the shops.