06/30/05 Meeting Notes
These notes are a best effort.
Blog your corrections and commentary.
Attendees:
- BI: Bill Ives
- MW: Mal Watlington
- BK: Beth Kanter – http://bethkanter.org and also a Cambodia blog.
- j: j Baumgart
- LB: Lynne Baehr
- EG: Erica George
- JD: Jared Dunn aka “Stripes”
- SR: Shimon Rura
- JA: Josh Ain
- BS: Brett Stilwell
- LW: Lisa Williams
- RF: Randy Fenstermacher
- guy to right of Jared aka “Plaid” – Ivan Askwith, no active blog but Geoff says to google him. Mit media studies entering student.
- guy 2nd to right of Jared aka “Seersucker” – MIT media studies entering student. Geoff Long. inkblotsmag.com/voice/totq Tip of the Quill (These guys will be working with Henry Jenkins. LB and EG think this is so beyond cool.)
- j wants it noted that Seersucker wasn’t actually wearing seersucker.
- PW: Parke Wilde, aka early in notes as “guy by door” usfoodpolicy.blogspot.com
Proposed Agenda:
- Foodblogs with Bill Ives.
- The daily nature of food and cooking and the daily nature of blogs seem to go naturally together. Moderator Bill Ives will take us on a culinary tour of the blogosphere.
- BI: I like writing about food. During the week my blog is business, weekends it’s music & food & fun things. I discovered that there’s a whole blogosphere niche for this. Restaurant promotion, reviews, recipes, etc.
- BI: A lot of what I’ll be linking to is here: http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2005/06/exploring_food_.html
- BI: Horsefeathers reataurant has a blog: http://hihowaya.blogs.com/. Trying to build community, etc., around the restaurant. He gets a lot of customers from it, lots of people continuing the discussion. Trying to get staff to blog, customer guestblogging etc. Anyone know of any other restaurants w blogs?
- LB: I saw a regular guy posting about starting a restaurant on his blog. I didn’t follow it tho.
- BI: What are ppl interested in us talking about today?
- BK: I found a restaurant blog directory on freedownloads, but only has 3 links, one in Chinese, one the NYTimes restaurant reviews.
- BI: Two folks in Vancouver who run VanEats. It’s built in Drupal.
- LW: Are most food blogs by people in the food industry? Or what’s the mix?
- BI: a range. many just enthusiasts.
- BI: some are food critics who are just food critics on blogs, if they get $ it’s from ads
- BI: fantasy iron chef: http://www.sautewednesday.com
- BI: Blogger Julie Powell now has a book chronicling her “Julie & Julia” project of cooking every one of Julia Child’s recipes. http://blogs.salon.com/0001399
- LW: Chris Lydon pre his current radio show did a great hourlong interview with Julie. Very fun.
- LB: MeatHenge: barbecue blog
- BI: White Trash Barbecue http://whitetrashbbq.blogspot.com – but don’t bbq in the buff, you may get burned! Eek. (this blogger’s wife was injured cooking, not bbq-ing, but someone else in her burn unit was injured bbq-ing)
- BI: Lots of non-blog websites, esp. southern, re BBQ
- BI: I have some blog posts about southern cuisine too, on my blog
- BI: advantage of recs from bloggers: you get a rec from someone you know, or feel you know. Much more personal than Zagats, say. You can ask them a more specific question. I asked Wendy about restaurants in Toronto.
- LB: People often ask for recs on their blog before a trip, report back afterwards.
- BI: some are really nicely visual. TastingMenu.com for example.
- LB: there are livejournal communities labeled food porn… 🙂
- LW: A guy I know who recently left his job is now going to have a web video cooking show. A lot of the food mystique pretends it’s a lot harder to cook than it is. Why do all the food writers in books have a food philosophy? Who is the philosopher kink/queen of foodblogging?
- BI: Well, winner of food blog award is Chocolate & Zucchini.
- LW: Does anyone aggregate restaurant reviews by bloggers?
- BI: No, but Roland of VanEats is advocating a standard…
- LB: I have a huge OPML of food blogs…
- LB: http://pinoycook.net – I first found this when I was trying to do more Filipino cooking since I was missing my mom. This was one of my intros to foodblogs actually. I have tried some of the recipes. Some more successful than others. After livejournal foodblogs are my biggest distraction.
- EG: crab ice cream?!?!?!
- LW: essay: The Man Who Ate Everything
- guy by door: http://kiplog/food has lots of nice photos
- LW: Chris Lydon read the 2nd entry on that foodblog on his June 14th Blogsday random walk around the net.
- LW: let’s skip dinner one day and have ice cream.
- all: mmm, iccceeeee creeeaaaammmmmmmmmm. Yum!
- MW: What about European foodblogs?
- LB: they’re starting to have more, yeah.
- MW: we eat to live here, they live to eat there, broadly speaking. you’d expect lots of good euro foodblogs.
- BI: actually some of the ones we’ve been looking at are in europe.
- LB: I’ve been looking for foodblogs in french lately, and there’s a growing number. ex: tetellita.blogspot.com is a French woman blogging about her food experiences in the US.
- JA: what about local foodblogs?
- LB: LJ has bostoneats, but it’s not active
- BI: I did something on cambridge restaurants, mal and amanda did one on boston for me
- LW: anyone use chowhounds?
- LB: I used it to find out about a pizza restaurtant i got a rec for on my trip to Philly.
- PW: I keep a blog on food politics and policy. http://usfoodpolicy.blogspot.com.
- all: wicked!
- PW: I have a lot on my blogroll sidebar too
- PW: cookingforengineers.com – it has *brilliant* graphic explanations of recipes. (EG: Seriously, you must look. Go now. They’re printable as cards even. OH wow.)
- all: why don’t all recipe books do it like this? why doesn’t he have a book. Whyyyyy?
- LB: he has a sidebar, called Appetizers, linking to other articles (EG: way cool way to organize a blog)
- LB: http://www.thefoodsection.com. http://www.bourrezvisage.com – aggregates many foodblogs
- MW: Hsiao-Ching Chou, seattle chef, now podcasting (found on bourrezvisage just now)
- Comment received post-meeting that seems most relevant to place here: Hi! I saw your notes on last nights evening, and wanted to weigh in with a few points. “Hsiao-Ching Chou, seattle chef”. Actually, she’s the Food Editor of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. There are many, many good local food blogs, including the mentioned VanEats as well as noodlepie (which covers Saigon), Seattle Bon Vivant (who covers Seattle) and Amateur Gourmet (who has New York City covered). There are many others as well, but those are the ones brought up most often. European blogs, as mentioned, are coming into their own. Chocolate and Zucchini, (who was mentioned) is run bt Clotuilde Dusolier, and she lives in Paris. Thanks! -Kate http://www.accidentalhedonist.com
- BI: Also on my blog: 100 point scale for rating beaches. We rated beaches in Italy. Best are in northern Sardinia. Best: Porto Rafael. Now we want to apply this to beaches in the US.
- LB:http://www.livejournal.com/community/picturing_food
- all: drool
- so, who wants dinner tonight….
- Future meeting topics to pencil in:
- Cameron Marlow on his Blog Survey and disseration, probably sometime in August (poss: 8/4, 8/11, 8/18…)
- Report-back from those of us attending BlogHer (7/30 in California) on 8/4?
- report back from Wikimania
- working with someone else building blogging community tools
- j: someone contacted me about this. they’re still a little vague with the details but they want to talk to some active bloggers about a blog community thing. but i don’t know much else yet about this.
- IA: can i do a session in september on celebrity blogs?
- possible blog summit
- j: i was asked to run by you all the idea of getting together with a local chapter of a professional org thinking of doign a technology summit incl blogs, wikis, rss, etc. it’s in pipedream stage now. but one model is bloggercon/unconference model. it’s librarians/info technologists. i’m trying not to get stuck cordinating too much. the main person whose brainchild it is will be interested in our help. but she needs to check with the professional assoc re how they are allowed to partner w outside orgs. and i’ll be asking some of you to speak, we have bloggercon experience, etc.
- Well wishes for Gregory
- July 4th along the river!!!
- j: I’ll be out on the Mem Drive side at some point. If you wanna hang out, wander by. Look for me. Um, I’ll have a hat. Or let me know in advance that you might.
- JA: I did this with j last year, had a good time
- What else?
- LW: I’m gonna solicit ideas on list for ideas for future meetings. Then put together a schedule for next few months. It’s possible for us to have a number of higher-profile people here if we want. a few higher-profile meetings. I’d like to hear what others think, what shape they think something like this might take.
- BI: like what?
- LW: Sam Rudy, Chuck Olson who did Blogumentary, maybe have Steve Garfield MC with videoblog shorts, invite Dave W, stuff like that. Invite a famous blogger & give them a podium. Not every meeting, too much work, but we have the power to bring ppl here.
- EG: concern re scheduling: let’s not fill up every single slot though. leave some open to fill in later-minute
- LW: i agree, let’s not go overboard. but it’s good to have a framework. i volunteer to do the asking if people want to suggest stuff to me.
- Eat:
- Smile Thai
- Last week: Free iLaw pizza and then Toscanini’s
