Former CNET cofounder and CEO Shelby Bonnie founded Whiskey Media in 2007 as a platform to build media and entertainment content sitesThe company, located in stunningly beautiful Sausalito, California (north of San Francisco) has no outside shareholders pestering them for a quick exit - the five cofounders, all former CNETers (Shelby Bonnie, Mike Tatum, Ethan Lance, Dave Snider and Andy McCurdy) have funded the company to date with less than $1.5 million.

I recently had lunch with Bonnie to talk about how Whiskey Media is doingIt has quietly grown in the last year and a half, and the team is preparing to unveil a number of new sites this year We first covered the company in October 2007 with the launch of Political Base.

It was, and is, notable because it's built as a "structured wiki" - freely editable by anyone, but the data isn't just one big unstructured blob like you see on Wikipedia and other wiki sitesEach section of a page is a separate silo, making it much easier to slice and dice data, and cross link around the site.

Political Base was the primary inspiration for how we structured our own CrunchBase database of people, startups and venture funds