At BigOven.com, while authors can edit their own recipes easily, you cannot easily edit someone else’s recipe, and that’s by design. As YongFook put well, we agree that it’s kind of hard to define what is the single, canonical “fettucini alfredo” recipe. Even master chefs will get into heated arguments about the classics, let alone more complex dishes.

Instead, to help try to reduce the complexity a bit, we chose to add a feature that we call “recipelinks”, in addition to tagging/folksonomy features.

RecipeLinks let users create directional links between recipes, letting you add things like “if you have leftovers of this recipe, make this other recipe”, or, “a variation on this recipe is”, or “I prefer making it this way”, or “I recommend serving it with this recipe”, etc. We just celebrated our 400,000th member, and are happy with the progress over the past couple of years.

Should be interesting to see as this area continues to expand!

Regardless, I wish you guys all the best with your site. Food is probably one of the most interesting and underrated spaces around… but it’s one of most profitable. Even in a recession, we still eat!

@Yongfook – never got to congratulate you on your acquisition. Looks like a good fit.

[shameless plug alert] If you haven’t voted in this year’s webbys.. check out BakeSpace (Social Networking Category) … I know, the horror! Our cupcakes are that good.

Try searching for the word egg and then taking a look at the text ads that show up. I don’t see anywhere that it says sponsored links or advertisement, although there is a “what’s this” link that you can click on to find out more about Yahoo!’s ad program. From a reader’s standpoint, these ads look like they are part of the site because they include things like Egg recipes, but readers won’t know that they’re ads until they actually click on them. It’d be great if you could include a sponsored listing at the top of them like most sites do.

At Project Foodie (http://www.projectfoodie.com) we’ve taken a more structured approach – we provide search and access to recipes from specific publication sources (magazines, newspapers, cookbooks, tv shows) combined with a recipe box and tagging. Rather than searching bunches of individual magazine sites, on Project Foodie, all the top magazine recipes are in one spot.

1) all text ads are clearly marked with a “sponsored links” mark.

2) all image ads are as you would see them on other web properties (i.e. no “this is an ad” text, but it should be obvious as they, well, look like ads).

Not sure where the confusion is, but if you have suggestions as to how we can make the ads seem more like ads, I’m all ears.

Way to go Barnaby and team! Definitely well deserved. You’re setting a fine example for us young pup startups.

I think a “recipes wiki” is something that sounds great on paper, but it goes against the whole idea of cooking. Cooking is about infinite variations and infinite taste palates, it’s not about one recipe for spaghetti to rule them all.

I know, because initially a “recipe wiki” was my idea for Open Source Food – that’s what I wanted it to be. I soon realised that it made no sense.

Foodista looks less like a community and more like an aggregator – and the fact that they are just pulling in photos from flickr means that they are just there as superfluous decoration: the picture you are seeing is not of the actual recipe you are reading. Simple example:

http://www.food...55Y4X/spaghetti

Recipe is for spaghetti, the first photo is of tagliatelle. That’s the problem when you’re just pulling in data from all over the shop.

Anyway, congrats on getting funded, Foodista. Hope the money gets put to good use!

Cheers
Jon

http://www.exam...ood-of-the-Gods