Is this the beginning of Whisky 2.0?

Online interest in one of GREEN's clients, Ladybank Company of Distillers (see previous post), is gaining as more than 700 posts have been made about the business.

Most recently Nick Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and acclaimed business blogger has added this to his post at Rough Type:

Ladybank has announced it is pioneering the communal, Internet-enabled production of Scotch whisky. "As a 'co-creation' company," explains a press release, "Ladybank enables a group of like-minded people to create a product, service or even a community that is free from the normal rules of commerce, because it is driven by their shared passion and shaped by their lifestyle choices."

The company is setting up an "online boardroom" to facilitate the harnessing of collective booze-making intelligence. Speaking proudly of a growing "virtual community of whisky lovers," James Thomson, the founder of this wikipedia of tipple, says, "At Ladybank we believe the community spirit we have created among the members will really inform what we do as a business and our online presence will also encourage members to engage with the Ladybank community and exchange their thoughts on how the project should progress.

On its blog, the company says that its "real foundations" are not its physical plants but "the people we have and how they are behind the project and interacting with it. We are the Web. And now we are the Distillery, too.

No word yet on whether they'll open source their recipes.

We like Nick because he can obviously see the potential of Web 2.0 and now the benefits of Whisky 2.0.

The evolution of Ladybank in fact pretty much mirrors that of Web 2.0. 1. Social structure or social formation (the organisation) 2. Social construction (the facilities) 3. Social production (the making) step 4. Social media (the ongoing conversation).

PS. On the grounds of open and fair disclosure you should know I am a director at GREEN and Ladybank is one of our clients.