Food Culture

With Guia Oleo, Argentines Tell It Like It Is

Yelp, Chowhound, Angie's List, TripAdvisor:  user-generated community sites are all the rage these days.  The sites offer a democratic way for companies to present themselves, as all of the reviews are contributed by regular, everyday people with a passion and an opinion.

Here in Argentina, there is a restaurant-review site which is wildly popular:  Guia Oleo.  Boasting 100,699 reviews from 482,970 users, the site has information for 4,609 restaurants.  Not quite the size of Zagat.com or even TimeOut, but the numbers are certainly impressive.

Too bad I learned of this after eating at several Buenos Aires restaurants, but I'll create and account and start reviewing.

 

Attention Food Blogger Friends: Four Manual Settings You Need to Know for Shooting Food - NYTimes.com

via dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com

Foodbuzz Calls on Food Bloggers Across the Country to Create Gulf Coast-Inspired Cuisine to Benefit the Greater New Orleans Foundation

Largest Online Food Community Harnesses Power of Social Media to Support Relief Efforts

As the Gulf Coast struggles to recover from the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Foodbuzz, the online food community, is calling on food bloggers across the country to cook up a Gulf Coast-inspired meal on July 24th -- and blog about it -- all in support of the Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF), which has been playing a key role in relief efforts in the wake of the tragic oil spill.

Each month, Foodbuzz' 24x24 section of the website showcases blog posts from 24 Foodbuzz Featured Publisher bloggers from around the world about meals they've prepared within one 24-hour period. This month, Foodbuzz has chosen 24 bloggers from around the country to serve as "Gulf Ambassadors" and host a Gulf Coast-inspired meal on Saturday, July 24th. A donation of $250 in the name of each of the bloggers will be donated to the GNOF, for an initial contribution of $6,000. Some of the participating bloggers from around the country include:

Passionate Eater - San Francisco
Cooking with Christen  - Louisiana
Fresh Local and Best - New York City
SheSimmers - Chicago
Le Grand Fromage - Florida
Don't (White) Sugar Coat It - Boston
Four Points Foodie - Austin
Wannabe TV Chef - Alabama
First, Make a Roux! - San Diego

For additional food bloggers -- up to 100 -- who would like to participate in the program by hosting their own Gulf Coast-inspired meal, Foodbuzz will also donate $25 in their name to the GNOF. Posts can be submitted to Foodbuzz on July 25th at editorial@foodbuzz.com.

The GNOF will give 100 percent of the proceeds to the fishermen and their families affected by the spill in the following parishes: Plaquemines, St. Bernard, lower Jefferson, Terrebonne, and Lafourche. The blog posts will be aggregated on Foodbuzz' 24x24 section and featured for one month.

Food Search Site Yummly Adds Features to Its Platform

Yummly, a foodie site that uses semantic search to deliver content to its users, announced today that it has added new features for searching and sharing to its intelligent food platform. Users can now send favorite recipes to friends and relatives in just two clicks, thanks to a new easy to use email button that makes sharing culinary finds simple. The email button expands the site's current recipe sharing options, which include integration with Facebook and its own internal social networking community: TasteBuds. (Food Culture admits: GREAT branding!)

Yummly also announced that registered users can now receive recipe recommendations -- handpicked for them based on their tastes and preferences -- delivered to their email inboxes each week, and can track popular recipes within the Yummly community with new search functions in the FoodFinder.

The new additions are designed to enhance its feature-rich recipe search platform that delivers a simplified, intuitive recipe search, and a vastly improved user experience for cooking enthusiasts around the globe.

Yummly's new features include:

--  Share Recipes via Email: Easy-to-use email button makes sharing recipes with friends and family easy for anyone.
--  Culinary Inspiration Delivered Right to Your Inbox: Registered users can now receive customized weekly e-newsletters with delicious recipe recommendations tailored specifically to their tastes.
--  What's Hot and What's Not: New recipe trending search feature allows users to discover what recipes are most popular on Yummly or highly rated by other users.

"We are pleased to deliver this latest round of features to further simplify and enhance our users' experience of finding and sharing recipes," said David Feller, CEO of Yummly, in a statement.  "We will continue to chart an aggressive product roadmap and look forward to further enriching our platform's feature set in the coming months."

For more on Yummly's new recipe emailing feature, visit:
http://blog.yummly.com/blog/2010/07/new-feature-email-your-recipes/.

Founded in 2009 by foodies on a mission to invent a better way to find, modify, share and store recipes, Yummly is the world's first semantic search platform for food.  Yummly seeks to empower individuals to discover recipes based on their personal tastes and preferences, and offers more than 500,000 of the most popular recipes aggregated from leading cooking sites and all over the web.

Visit the Yummly blog at blog.yummly.com, connect on Facebook, www.facebook.com/yummly, or follow on Twitter www.twitter.com/yummly.

Chefs Can Teach Us a Lot about Social Media

Courtesy of Eric Fulwiler of SocialMediaToday

Want to succeed in social media? Think like a chef

There are so many examples to point to that prove social media isn’t a new ecosystem. The forces that drive success in social media can be adopted from many (most?) other personal and professional experiences. You already know that your grandmother can teach you at least 10 things about social media.

And if you like to cook, chances are you already know what it takes to succeed in social media. And if you don’t, then this post will serve up a lesson in both social media and cooking.


You have to know what you are cooking before you start mixing ingredients. A chef knows what he is trying to create when he starts cooking. It’s always easier to create ’something’ when you know what that ’something’ is. And yet many businesses just start throwing social media ingredients together hoping it will turn into a creme brulee. It won’t…

The quality of the ingredients is the most important factor in any dish. If you use fresh, quality ingredients in your dishes, your food will always taste better. And if you use fresh, quality ingredients (content, input, conversations) in your social media, everyone will want a taste.

Each tool in your kitchen serves a different purpose. You wouldn’t use a frying pan to cook a turkey because it’s not the right tool to get the job done. You have to know what the ‘job’ is before you choose the tool to accomplish it. Don’t fire up a Twitter account or Facebook page until you are sure it’s the right tool to get the ‘job’ done.

Don’t try to do too many things at once. There is only so much even the most experienced chef can accomplish at once. If you try to boil pasta, grill chicken, steam vegetables, bake a cake, and blend a gazpacho at the same time, one (or all) of your dishes is going to turn out overcooked, burned, or mushy. Take your time to do every dish or social media community right, and don’t take on more than you can handle at once.

Presentation is always important. It’s in our nature to use all our senses to determine the quality of an experience. A dish will always taste better when it is presented well, and a social media offering will always seem more interesting/legitimate/enticing when its design looks professional.

*****

Now, cooking and social media are not easy. They all take a certain level of skill and experience to do well. But both start with basic fundamentals and thinking that you now know, and can begin (or continue) to apply. Enjoy…

CNN Launches Eatocracy

CNN.com today announced the launch of Eatocracy, a blog created to feed the minds, hearts and stomachs of food fanatics across the world.  Covering the pulse of food news – from its culture and trends to the politics and economics of eating -- Eatocracy will aim to be a destination for passionate dialogue and debate about food.

 

 

 

Ted Allen's Rules of Food Blogging

In the "Ask Ted" column in the April 2010 issue of Food Network Magazine, Ted Allen offers advice on how to properly and professionally blog about an experience at a restaurant.  "In the age of Twitter, Facebook, camera phones and blogs, chefs have to confront the reality that anyone can publish withering report cards -- instantly, even in the middle of a meal," writes Allen.

Of course, everybody eats and everybody has feelings about food, so shouldn't everybody have a voice?  "Well, yes...I guess," continues Allen.  "But new-media foodies need to consider a few rules before tucking into a restaurant's work."

Here are some of Allen's suggestions:

1. Give new restaurants at least six weeks to smooth out kinks, and before going negative, try to make another trip.
2. Learn as much as you can about food and cooking -- read the work of established critics, study cookbooks, watch food TV -- and evaluate chefs with respect and sincerity.
3. Despite the anonymity the Internet affords, resist being sarcastic.
4. Don't expect to be fed for free.
5. Get a good camera and shoot one or two dishes, not everything on the menu (and never use a flash)
6. Don't expect immediate responses to inquiries you send to chefs.

Food blogging -- especially restaurant blogging -- is a double-edged sword.  With the demise of thorough newspaper coverage, and the simultaneous explosion of blogs, restaurateurs can certainly benefit from good, viral, word-of-mouth marketing.  However, one nasty review can do significant damage, and with no single blogger code of ethics, anything still goes.  Food Culture seconds Allen's opinion to think before one blogs about a dining experience.

Bloggers should consider themselves journalists -- committed to reporting the news with fairness, accuracy, and ethics.  The results of the 2010 PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey, released this past Thursday, found that 52% of bloggers consider themselves journalists, an increase from just one in three from the previous year's survey.  This is good news for everyone, as we can all be assured that we are reading higher-quality articles in the blogosphere, including food and restaurant reviews.