the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Recipe Management - Online or Offline? Print or Software?

As the Web Chef and a food afficionado, I'm always interested to read about where consumers are finding food tips and recipes and how they are using online and offline tools to manage, organize and share their recipes.  I've been a devotee of Epicurious.com for a number of years, but also enjoy the pleasure of clipping and trying recipes from the Food section of local and national papers. 

Lifehacker had an interesting poll and review of the benefits of using online recipe management vs. traditional offline print.  Of the 1580 votes, Lifehacker found that 36% of respondents weren't ready to move away from their print-based note cards, binders or notebooks.  They continued to like these "old fashioned" ways as part of their cooking process. 

My partner and I are part of this group.  Even though we designed our kitchen during our remodelling and expansion project to include a Cat5 Internet connection and a pull out shelf  for a laptop, we've found that the "traditional" mode still works best.  (Besides that the shelf is now full of our overflow of Penzey's Herbs and Spices) We use a set of binders where we can take recipes from print sources (taped to a three hole drilled sheet), from friends, from online sources (printed out) and combine them into a binder indexed by major ingredient. 

Lifehacker blogger Jason Fitzpatrick reviewed the online tools including the top four were rank ordered by survey respondents with these results - Other (18%), Evernote (17%), Other (18%), SousChef (14%), AllRecipes (9%) and Big Oven (5%).  

So what other tools are out there? 

I was curious so I did a search and came up with quite a few including 23 indexed and referenced in DMOZ..org and a few others that are either software or web-based:

• Food (online community and recipe storage)
• LivingCookbook (software for Windows)
• MacGourmet (software for the Mac)
• MasterCook (software)
• MyRecipeCircle (online community)
• OpenEats (online community)
• Recipezaar (online recipes)
• TasteBook(create your own cookbook)

You can also find a ranking and review of ten tools at TopTenReviews, where BigOvens ranked #1, followed by Living CookBook and MasterCook Deluxe. 

Photograph of soup is from stock.xchng.

My name is Alice. I want to be your direct household goods supplier.

Madison, WI-based Alice has launched to be your direct household goods supplier.  From the founders of social shopping service Jellyfish, since sold to Microsoft for $50 million, Alice.com has received positive press in the local media and in the technology media with a recent review in TechCrunch, a major web 2.0 and technology blog.  According to TechCrunch, Alice has over 6,000 goods and has a robust search engine that allows you to search by room, by product type, by price point, by coupon availability and by your philosophy (green products).  The service creates a profile with a reminder system for when you should be expected to re-order the products you've previously ordered.  It also crawls the web to find coupons for the products offered at the site.  The other neat feature, according to TechCrunch, is that it has a built-in shopping comparison engine that crawls the web to compare Alice's prices with those of other online vendors of the same product.

When I registered on the site, I found that they also had an interesting feature with coupons displayed as a footer on the site that you could scroll through.  The coupons had a limited offer in terms of the number available helping create some imagery of scarcity and urgency around that particular offer.

In terms of social media, Alice has three blogs - a founder's blog, a community blog and a company blog and also is on Twitter where they had 1794 followers. 

Interestingly the Alice favicon is a duck.  I'm not sure why, since the logo, at least in its beta version, is a stylized box or doorway.  The tagline is everyone needs an alice, so maybe Alice will later be introduced as the duck. 

I initiated a live chat session with an Alice representative and found the responsiveness and knowledge to be a positive.  I asked the rep why the disconnect between the favicon and the logo and she indicated that the duck was symbolic for "getting your ducks in a row" and that the duck does show up periodically throughout the site.  She rightfully suggested that I register on the site to see what she meant.  What I found is that the duck is the metaphor for the categories of items that you might want to add to your shopping cart as you can see from the screenshot on the right. Once you're in the site you make the connection with the favicon duck, but somehow before you've registered it isn't totally clear.  With the tagline "everyone needs an Alice" I assume that Alice is the duck helping me shop.

When I went to the community blog I found what might be considered another tagline "we heart household products" and at the company blog they are using "welcome to the alice company blog". 

 
 

LinkedIn Connections Widget

I'm investigating a possible feature for a client that I think is very interesting. It is a LinkedIn widget that can be attached to an article that will in turn tell you who is in your network at companies referenced in the article. You can find out more by viewing this video that shows the use of the widget at Business Week.

I tested the widget at an article on Business Week that was discussing the Circuit City closure and liquidation sale. When I went to the LinkedIn Connection widget it brought up 3 "friends" at Best Buy. I'm not sure why Best Buy was the connection that came up since the story was really about Circuit City and found that none of the three were my friends.

Here's a screenshot of the three names that came up when I clicked on the widget.

Web Tidbits - Web 2.0, Photo Sharing

I've been remiss in posting to this blog. 

Here are a couple of links to articles and resources that I thing you'll find interesting.

State of the Blogosphere - Technorati, Day 1 of their 5 part series on the status of blogs.  Today's report covers "Who are the Bloggers?", with the next 4 days expanding on the topic.  Among the findings are that North American bloggers are 57% male, 59% above 38 years old and 74% college graduates (yeah!  I fit in).

Beyond Blogs - Business Week writers and bloggers Heather Green and Stephen Baker refresh their popular 2005 cover story "Blogs Will Change Your Business" with "Beyond Blogs", a refreshing look at some of the many tools of social computing that are having an impact within the enterprise and among consumers.

Photo Sharing Sites - Looking for photo sharing sites beyond Flickr?  Check out this listing and evaluation on Photography Bay of 45 sites.

Wacky Widgets Continue Growth

Fortune reports on the extreme valuation that T.Rowe Price and Fidelity have projected in Slide, one of the top widget producers given their recent $50 million, 9.1% stake investment in the firm.  Their 50 million widget users, with many more projected to be on the way, are seen as providing a potential monetization opportunity well beyond the keyword ad results associated with search engine giant Google.  With "engagement marketing" becoming the new mantra on the web, it is felt that what better tool to generate engagement then one where the user elects to interact for play, content acquisition or other purposes.

The article also references RockYou, "Slides" largest competitor. 

In other widget news, The Wall Street Journal references Gigya a widget distributor that recently raised $9.5 million.  In a brief report compiled by Scott Austin of VentureWire, the Journal states "The publisher can track the number of times a widget is installed, where it is placed and how many times it is viewed, among other metrics."

For more on widgets see my article "Widgets - web components for plug, play and pay" in Wisconsin Technology Network. 

Paul Gibler

Web Tidbits - Social Networks

The BBC reports that AOL has acquired Bebo, the third most popular social network in the U.S. for $850 million.  The acquisition will give them a foothold in the emerging market for advertising and marketing through social networks. According to the article Bebo has "40 million viewers worldwide who view an average of 78 pages per day each."

AdRants reports on the beta launch of socialthing!, a Boulder, CO-based company that will aggregate social media sites into a single view.

iMediaConnection author Jere Doyle has an article titled "Find the right social network for your brand" that gives some tips on evaluating demographics and marketing opportunities through social networks.

Web Tidbits - Online Music and Video, Widgets

The Wall Street Journal reported today "Web Tools to find Your Inner DJ" on some of the developments in the online music space.  Among the trends and sites that they referenced were the following:

• Music Streaming Sites - Jango, Pandora (I've been using this one for awhile and love it. )
• Music Search Engines - seeqpod, songza, SkreemR
• Music Social Networking Sites - imeem, last.fm, iLike, MyStrands

Widgets
iMedia Connection has a video clip introducing widgets and the role that they can play as part of your marketing strategies.  You can see the video at: Widget Marketing 101. Also see their article "Do Widgets Spell Doom for Portals?"

For more on widgets see my article "Widgets: Web Components for Plug and Play" at Wisconsin Technology Network.

Online Video
CoolzOr has a posting on a new service called Hey!Spread that allows you to upload your promotional videos to 17 sites saving you the hassle of individual uploads. 

New Column in Wisconsin Technology Network - Widgets

I've written a new column in the monthly series of articles, Buzz Networks, recently published in Wisconsin Technology Network.  The article "Widgets - web components for plug, play and pay" reviews the evolving and expanding world of widgets or gadgets and the benefits they can provide companies looking to connect and distribute their messages widely. 

With Facebook, Microsoft and the major blog platforms endorsing these portable applications, they will only be growing in the future.

If you'd like me to come and speak to your group on the latest developments in e-marketing, I'd be happy to discuss your budget, needs and schedule.  Please contact me in the United States at 608 255 4092 or via e-mail.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Paul J Gibler

e-Business and Marketing Glossaries

Periodically I like to post e-business and marketing glossaries that I've identified.  Previous glossary postings include one about a Financial Times Glossary of digital business terms.

Ourmedia has another glossary that you might find interesting called the Social Media Glossary.  Many of the terms that are identified in this glossary are further elaborated on with additional examples in the series of articles that I've written over the past year and a half for a Wisconsin Technology Network column called Buzz Networks.  Take a look at these articles for additional resources and insights on RSS, blogs, social networks, podcasts, wikis, online advertising, etc.

Paul Gibler
the Web Chef

Web Tidbits - Web 2.0 Miscellaneous

Strategy & Business has a new article "Web 2.0 Profiting from the Threat" that makes some interesting points.  In the article they reference recent Booz Allen & Hamilton research that found 50% of internet users visit a social media site.  They had 3 summary suggestions for businesses to keep in mind as their strategies evolve:

1. Businesses are no longer in charge of their message
2. Marketing channels are fragmenting
3. Web 2.0 is magnifying customer complaints

For each of these items case studies are supplied.

For more Web 2.0 coverage, you might want to take a look at the series of articles I've written for Wisconsin Technology Network under the Buzz Networks column with a series of 13 articles on a wide range of Web 2.0 topics - podcasts, social networks, RSS feeds, wikis, blogs, etc.

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I offer presentations and consulting services on Web 2.0 techniques.  I'd be happy to speak to your group and/or talk to you about your organization's needs for enhancing your web strategies.  Give me a call at 608 255 4092 or e-mail me for more information.

Paul Gibler
the Web Chef