Food goes Web 2.0
As some of you know, I am a devout foodie. Hence my daily feeds including some of the famous food blogs like Slashfood and Mahanandi.
With the Web 2.0 phenomenon over the past year, I have always hoped to see a service utilize these elements for a service around recipes and user generated content. Most recipe sites generate content themselves and present in typical HTML pages. It is time to introduce services, which can leverage the video phenomenon and allow users to post content. Such services should also leverage on technologies such as tagging.
Recently I came across two services, which are really attempting to make noise in this space with interesting Web 2.0 elements.
Rouxbe (pronounced as Roo-bee) is one of the high quality premium service with 30 day trial offer. The service allows the users to browse real high quality recipe videos. Almost all recipes on the site are available in this format. They also sell versions for your iPod and Apple TV (including HD version).
The video recipes are professionally produced by the service itself. If users want to add recipes they have to sign up as a Chef, which requires a verification process. Typical users can browse recipes and leave comments, which somewhat gives a community feel to the site.
Overall I am certainly impressed by the video production quality and cataloging of the content. However the service is closed to normal users and does not really leverage user generated content. Paying around $50 per year for this service maybe a hard ask for most users.
The other service which I came across is Tasty Food TV. This is very YouTube like implementation (almost too close). However this is pure user generated content posted by people like you and us. In addition they leverage tags and other meta-data. Here is a sample video for your pleasure.
These services are just a start but I am happy to see movement in this space. A great service in this domain will offer the following:
- Wiki like editing features for recipes
- Ability to post recipes and content in various media formats
- Tag based searching and presentation
- Easy integrable widgets, which can be posted on food blogs
- Sharing advertisement revenue with content generators
Deploying such a service enables the provider to sell ads which are highly customized. The advertisers can deeply customize their ads to match the content of the site, thus driving higher rates (hence higher revenues).
