What tagging is (and what it isn’t)
It’s not easy to categorize restaurants. It sounds easy, but once you try, it becomes what Noah calls “a rabbit hole.” You can start out with the classic phone-book classification by cuisine (Mexican, Italian, Chinese, etc.) but things go off the rails very quickly. Does “sushi” get its own classification? Should Tu Y Yo be classified as Mexican along with Taco Bell and the San Francisco burrito carts? Probably not, but then how do you classify it?
How many attributes does a restaurant need to have? Its hours, address, and telephone are obvious, but what about descriptive attributes like whether it can serve alcoholic beverages? Whether or not take-out is available?
If you’re already familiar with a few so-called “Web 2.0″ applications, you’re already familiar with tagging. If you’re not, the concept may be a little confusing at first. Tagging, or labeling, allows site users to attach their own attributes to something like a restaurant, and in doing so, apply their own classifications.
This sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. As a user, all you need to do is consider what keywords describe a restaurant for you. You don’t need to worry about describing it completely, just describe it as you understand it. Someone else may have other tags to add. I tagged Sound Bites with “breakfast“, “waffles“, “pancakes“, and “ballsquare” (the name of its neighborhood,) so I described it with a meal, some dishes, and a geographic description. Now it’s classified, in an incomplete way, by cuisine and geography. Someone else may add “coffee” and “brunch”, refining the classification without major reorganization.
I used “takeout” on Bueno Y Sano and Antonio’s. Both Antonio’s and Pizza Paradiso are tagged with “pizza,” but Antonio’s is also tagged with “slices“. Audrey is tagging restaurants in French, which creates another classification in another language that doesn’t necessarily match the classifications in English.
In short, tagging lets us all create a categorization of restaurants (and everything else on the site) that is flexible, dynamic, and created by the community, not imposed upon it. Click the tags themselves, and you’ll see a list of all other restaurants (or other entities) which have been tagged with the same tag.
There’s a limit to what tagging can handle, though. I tagged Bub’s with “barbeque“, “barbecue” and “bbq“, which are three ways of saying the same thing. (OK, I missed “bar-b-que.”) Why? Because I had no way of knowing what someone else might be looking for. What if I tag Wally’s with “sandwich” and someone is searching for “sandwiches“? (Or “hogs”?) Or what if I tag Blue Ribbon with “trythis”, which has no real meaning to anyone but me?
And any way I try to come up with to describe a restaurant’s hours using tags becomes a complicated mess very, very quickly.
Any registered user can tag things on our site. Go ahead, give it a try.
Food and Film
Slate has published a survey of food movies, from such classics as Tampopo to this year’s No Reservations and Ratatouille. The slideshow includes a clip from each movie, and has inspired me to add a few to my Netflix queue.
Congrats to RecipeZaar!
E.W. Scripps’ acquisition of recipe sharing site RecipeZaar.com is the latest in a series of M&A in that sector, and we couldn’t be happier for them. They should benefit immensely from an association with the Food Network people, and we look forward to watching the ride.
Stripe generator
It looks like we’re going to need to change our design.
I moderate spam, therefore I am
Until you have significant site traffic, sometimes you look for any kind of sign that you’re actually alive and online. We got one today: our first spam comment on this site. Thanks, guys!
Everyone else likes our ideas, too
There’s an article in the June 25 New York Times, titled “Readers Are Key Ingredient as Virtual Kitchen Heats Up.” As you can imagine, we read this with great interest.
The “virtual kitchen,” of course, is just where we expect to be living for the next few months, and the article has a number of statements which read like validation of our own homework on the topic. For example, author Bob Tedeschi justifies the activity in this space with these points:
recipe searches are among the most popular online endeavors for women, and major advertisers want to be there to greet them.
“When people want to find a new recipe these days they go to the Internet, more so than cookbooks, magazines or anything else,” said Kenneth Cassar, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings. “The Internet has fundamentally changed the way people do that.”
And, Tedeschi goes on to point out, they’re not just searching a recipe database: they’re “looking for friends as much as they are seeking recipes,” which translates into buzzwordese as “social networking.” We had a similar argument in the first version of our business plan (which, I should add, got us in to the finals of the Tufts Business Plan contest.)
Of course, what would really be nice would be if this sort of article had emerged as we launched, or when we were talking to investors. (Don’t think a PDF isn’t going to find its way into the Subversion repository of our business plan.) (Yes, our business plan has a Subversion repository. We’re engineers, not MBAs.)
It’s not just the Times, either. Just this morning I was reading my “Ruby Inside” feed and found a link to this Liverail tutorial on building Facebook Platform apps in Rails. Guess what they’re using as an example in the demo? A recipe sharing application. I suspect a lot of the companies currently creating Facebook Platform apps are seeing tremendous amounts of member churn as the fickle Facebook audience adds and removes their apps, but even if only a small percentage of that audience sticks around, it’s still a significant jump in membership, and when you count your membership in dozens (as we do at this early stage), that kind of growth can be a huge jump-start.
It’s nice to have the Times and unrelated Rails tutorials validating our first idea as a good one, but we know as well as anyone that good ideas will only carry you through the business plan; ultimately, we need a good implementation, and that’s still in progress. More on that in the next few weeks.
In use
We really opened up the first application to users today, but so far only to people who’ve signed up for our mailing lists. If you really want to see what we’ve been able to build so far, go back to the first two posts and sign up to answer some questions and get some email from us.
Food bloggers Needed
We are currently looking for English or French food bloggers to give us a hand. If you keep a weblog and write on a fairly regular basis (i.e. once a month or more) about cooking, restaurants, food, etc., I would like to get your opinion on your current blog tool. I only have a few questions, one or two emails should do the trick!
If you are interested, write me at audrey@commonkitchen.com.
Introducing CommonKitchen.com
Common Kitchen is an up-and-coming next-generation online community for food enthusiasts. We are focused on constructing novel (and effective) recipe and restaurant search engines as well as building a customized blogging platform specifically designed for food bloggers. There are many more features also in the works, but we can’t give everything away!
We are currently planning a public beta in late August 2007, and are now soliciting input from foodies like you. Although we would love to hear from all of you, we are primarily interested in three categories of users: food bloggers, home cooks, and restaurant explorers. It is our hope that by listening to your needs and desires we will be able to build a comprehensive food community that is truly useful whether you are a professional blogger or a casual cook.
If you would like to become involved please contact our community manager Audrey to join our user advisory panel or register for our alpha testing phase. We plan on supporting French and English speakers initially, and expanding into other languages as the site develops. If you are multi-lingual and would like to help guide that transition we would be most appreciative.