There is a boom in fakery. The Internet is a perfect breeding ground for hogwash and deception. This pursuit is becoming a dark art form all in its own right with massive covert marketing drives making you think you want to buy something because someone named joe90 posted positively about it on a forum. The fact is that joe90 is one of thousands of fake accounts managed by a large company that wants to sell more stuff.

So running websites and publishing comments from others can be tricky. If you google your malaise the chances are some website will tell you your head is about to fall off, and cheap Viagra is the perfect cure. If you had engaged your fuzzy brain before engaging Google you may have remembered those three glasses of port you drank before bed. Google cannot cure a hangover, only time will take care of that (although don’t listen to me, after all I am just another web site). Unfortunately the recently evolved human web reflex takes over these days and defaults to Google before consulting the brain. Google being a projection of the larger global shared brain made up of people who post pictures of their backsides on Facebook.

When you add incentive into the mix, for example rewarding people for reviewing stuff, you could end up with all sorts of problems.

With this in mind I stumbled across a new website called WineDemon. A sort of social network of wine reviewers, giving power to the person in a restaurant handed a confusing wine list, armed only with an iPhone. All sounds great, except in big bold letters you notice that you earn points for each rating you make which are redeemable as wine. A massive incentive for imagination to take precedent over reality. I don’t want to be sitting in a restaurant, struggling to get a valid 3G connection on my iPhone (which is probably almost out of juice), for a wine app to tell me (with a last gasp before my phone dies) to order a certain wine that 300 people have recommended just so they themselves can get free wine.

I am sure that the members on WineDemon are good honest wine lovers, and I am certainly not implying that this site has untrustworthy reviews, but I don’t see how you can prune out the good from the bad on the web in general. There is always someone prepared to rampage with false reviews for personal gain. This is an inherent growing flaw of Web 2.0 model and social networking in general.

The name demon is an interesting choice as it is historically an evil spirit, whereas daemons are benevolent spirits. Perhaps the spelling of daemon is not so web friendly, or demon has a naughty edge, more fitting to wine consumption, combined with the idea of being a demon at wine (ie skilful). There is a theme though, as the project is backed by Rowan Gormley who has the concept of Wine Angels on his site Naked Wines. Let's hope this obsession with Angels and Demons makes a better read than Dan Brown's.

In truth it looks like a well designed, good snappy site, with a clear goal, but it may well get lost in the plethora of wine apps out there.

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