Category Archives: technology

Devices, products, systems, ideas.

Where are the Australian chefs on Wikipedia?

I’ve been meaning to write this for months. Where oh where is the Australian culinary content on Wikipedia? It’s pitiful. Stephanie Alexander is completely absent. Maggie Beer is described as a ‘cook’ and doesn’t even get a mention in the category Australian chefs. Donna Hay is an Australian chef, apparently. Neither Gay nor Tony Bilson get an entry. And if you explore related categories, you’ll find that numerous significant restaurants are missing (Quay, Aria, Bennelong, Claude’s, Grossi Florentino, Mietta’s, Jacques Reymond, Vue de Monde, etc), while alongside the few notables (Bistro Moncur, Flower Drum, Berowra Waters Inn) are dross like the Pancake Parlour and Henny Penny.

I think it’s time to encourage food-aware Australians to get online and fix this! For all its flaws, Wikipedia still offers a great resource — especially when articles benefit from many knowledgable people’s input. Too often, the internet offers a wealth of thoroughly impoverished information. It can be improved! Although Australian foodbloggers are by no means the only people with knowledge of the food scene, past and present, they are at least some of the more community-minded participants in that scene. So come on guys and gals, get onto Wikipedia and fix the flaws, add content and perhaps make some of the PR drivel in some entries a little more informative. It’s fairly easy to sign up and do edits. Just keep it nice.

And don’t stop at restaurants and personalities! How about padding out the Australian cuisine section too. Heavens! The delightful Iced Vo Vo makes and appearance, but Cherry Ripe is subsumed into an article about a song. 😛

Think of it as a service to journalism… cos we know that with so few writers and editors left at various major papers, the quality of plagiarisable sources has to be at its best 😉

And if you live in another land, why not check whether there’s adequate content for your country’s/cuisine’s food scene?

Spread the word.

Finger numb, eyes rolling, mouth salivating

I’ve spent much of the last week limply scrolling the trackball of my nifty mouse, trying to conquer the number of posts in my feed reader. These are the thrilling things you do when you are, seemingly, the last person in town to have come down with the flu/bronchitis/laryngitis which has been ravishing Melbourne for the last four months.

For the entire week, Google Reader displayed the ominous message “All items (1000+)”. It never changed. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, scanning titles frantically until my eyeballs were rotating faster than the trackball. It’s probably a good thing that the Reader doesn’t bother counting higher than one thousand. I would venture a guess that I had over 4000 items waiting to be read. Had I realised that, I might just have blitzed everyone’s words and started afresh. Goddamnit! You people write too much!

Alongside all the foodbloggers from near, far and further are my trusty brainfoods… places like BoingBoing, Freakonomics, ReadWriteWeb, Science-Based Medicine, to name a few.

But you know what? Today, at 23:26, my cramping scroll-finger shivered with joy as the Google Reader showed I had scaled the pile of feedliness. “All items (926)” Sadly, this cannot last without further cramping and maddened eyeball rolling, for those 926 items encompass a mere six days of posts from the various feeds. Six days. People, stop writing so much! 😛

It was lucky I could calm my nerves tonight on a special delivery, courtesy of the J-man of Malvern and, more precisely, the favours of J-man’s jetsetting Mother-V. Late last night I received an SMS: “Make time for me tomorrow. Just ten mins.”

The merchandise was handed over in Bourke Street. A small, nondescript package. Furtive glances. I concealed the tupperware under my jacket and hastened back to the office. I clung my bag tightly to my bosom all the way home. (It was rush-hour, so pretty much the entire train felt like it was clamped tightly to me.)

Air-freighted from Ladurée, Paris. What a way to lift the mood after a week of trackball scrolling and watching bad telly.

Alas, after just 35 mins, Google Reader now shows

Mainstream and new media incompatible? (or: Does The Age Epicure censor bloggers?)

[This article will be updated if further information comes to hand. I can be contacted privately via the contact page, or comments can be left below.]

The relationship between mainstream media publications and the online world is strange in Australia. A new media of blogs, independent commentators, expert forums and the like has burgeoned in cyberspace. Meanwhile, attempts to integrate new media into the online presence of existing old media entities have been late to the stage and range from tokenistic to populist. Online resources are used freely by journalists and the mainstream media, but a willingness to incorporate these resources into old media offerings is lacking, seemingly to the point of wilful neglect.

Bloggers, the major part of the new media spectrum, get a bad run in much mainstream press. Howls of outrage emanate from desks and laps around the world quite regularly. Print editors huff back at the howls, pointing out that bloggers are illiterate, opinionated, unmoderated, attention seeking gits who need another hobby. Neither side has the highground in this argument.

There are many successful bloggers who do exactly what print media opinion writers are paid to churn out. Some blogging domains (subjects) work well for a mainstream audience and are readily incorporated into mainstream publications. Tech-blogging is the obvious example. There are many successful, well paid tech-bloggers with their finger on the pulse of an incredibly fast-moving area. Some media organisations have recognised their value. Political blogging also works well for some people and has created names both locally and overseas (Crikey and it’s contributors are an early crossover media format). I don’t know that political bloggers earn much from their sites, but I expect that other lucrative opportunities arise for the more credible writers.

There are domains other than tech and politics that lend themselves to high-interest blogging, of course, though without the money. The number of bloggers in Australia and almost everywhere else who want to communicate something about what they cook or eat is enormous, though hardly surprising. Cookbooks sell well. Restaurants do a roaring trade. People like to communicate about food. As with anything, it’s not all done well. Passion doesn’t always translate into perfect prose. For many people, the warmth of the experience and (probably) photographic evidence is a higher priority. Each to their own. Most food bloggers aren’t seeking renown. They want to share their enthusiasm. And of those who do find renown, not many successfully move from online enthusiasm to gripping commissioned prose.

I’ve always found the vehemence of the print media response to bloggers a bit perplexing. Yes, bloggers mostly present unedited text, often longwinded or self-indulgent, but take a look at a range of professional writers’ raw text and you’d quickly realise that some of those writers produce copy which is little better than middling blog content. It gets polished by others.

Certainly, far too many foodblogs rely on other people’s recipes or derived content, too often without attribution, to gain a following. However, I’m often surprised at how obviously nicked some recipes in mainstream magazines are. Loosely derived content is often the meat in the lifestyle feature sandwich. Plagiarism isn’t the preserve of poor bloggers.

Thank god for the editors, eh?! Yep, the editors who are meant to act as gatekeepers for quality and, um, quality? No. Not quite. The writers are generally relied on to check their own facts or not to nick others’ material. Ironically, food isn’t treated as enough of a specialist area to always warrant editors (or, sometimes, writers) who actually know about their subject matter. There are exceptions, naturally, but not enough of them. Neither writing nor editing pay enough to retain many people who really know. And neither job is much fun. Editors have an unenviable position between readers, advertisers, writers and management. Writers have to work really hard to make a living. As Ed Charles mentioned on Tomato recently, even big names like Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack aren’t necessarily raking in the moolah.

I’m trying really hard to keep some balance here, as discussion of these topics so often deteriorates into one-sided rants. I’ve been reworking some old ground in talking about the problems between blogs and the media. As recently as March this year, it was made clear, yet again, just how blindly prejudiced mainstream media editors can be about bloggers [1][2][3]. So why do I raise it again?

Yesterday, in the aftermath of my annoyance at an article in The Age Epicure — probably once Australia’s most interesting wide-circulation food publication — I was told some disturbing information. It was suggested to me by a source who I would usually trust that Epicure will not, as a matter of policy, write about or make reference to bloggers. (Let’s ignore John Lethlean’s mention of Stephanie Wood’s blog late last year, cos, you know, she’s not just a blogger. She’s also a stunningly opinionated editor. Who blogs.)

Just in case you missed it the first time: it is suggested that Epicure will not, as a matter of policy, write about or make reference to bloggers. Leanne Tolra at Epicure responded to an enquiry about why an interview with me was omitted from an article yesterday saying, plausibly, that the article needed to be shorter and there had been a number of bloggers interviewed, but in the end they had to be cut. Sounds reasonable. If you are a blogger who was interviewed, please leave a note in the comments section. A follow-up to Tolra asking about the issue of deliberate omission hasn’t yet seen a reply.

Could Epicure (or perhaps Fairfax as a whole?) be so stupid as to have a policy that wilfully deprives any (external) bloggers of media exposure? If it’s true, what could be the reasons?

Let me see…

  1. Financial. Readership numbers are important for advertising revenues. Mentioning bloggers might mean readers would switch to reading hundreds of colourful food sites. But wait, aren’t bloggers crap? Why would readers switch? The primary fear is probably of restaurant reviews. A newspaper’s reviewer profile is the biggest drawcard for the majority of readers. That’s right, Epicure could churn out the same stuff every week, use foreign syndicated material, and ignore informed debate, just as long as John Lethlean and Matt Preston remain popular with the readers. (It’s notable that blogs that review restaurants bear the brunt of the animosity from the mainstream media.)
  2. Company brand strength. Tie readers into an internal blog setup so that they lose sight of the rest of the blog world. I suspect only a small subset of online newspaper readers are drawn into their blogs, not least because of the mess of comments that follows. It also means paying more writers or pissing off existing staff writers by making them produce even more content.
  3. Ideological. We already know that at least one Fairfax editor holds foodbloggers in such low regard that she’s happy to throw uninformed insults at a knowledgeable audience. Could this malady be more widespread? It’s easier to paint a whole cohort of people with one disdainful brush than to spare a moment to read or (heavens!) participate. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any Australian foodwriters or foodmag editors who openly participate in the shadowy, mysterious community of foodbloggers in Australia (I’m completely ignoring Ms Wood here, but I’m sure I’ll have missed someone somewhere!). Has anyone had a comment on their site? A majority of the foodwriters I know admit to rarely if ever reading foodblogs. Not just that, they don’t read dynamic forums like eGullet or Chowhound, which is kinda strange, given that many overseas foodwriters worth their salt are active contributors.

So, let’s think for a moment. I can’t for the life of me recall a mention of a blog in the pages of Epicure, but my reading of it has become less and less enthusiastic in the last two years, so I might have missed something. More broadly, The Age and other print media rarely mention external blogs, except in the technology pages or when a prominent person has one. For the moment, I’m quite willing to believe that Epicure and perhaps its master, Fairfax, are deliberately obscuring the contribution of external new media to Australia’s information landscape.

If we assume that points (1) and (2) are valid, then I guess we have to resign ourselves to an enduring real-blogs-vs-media-companies existence. However, if point (3) forms part of the picture then the online community must proselytise and chastise in equal measure. The diverse character and depth of new media participants’ contributions to the world of food and eating is substantial. To obscure this from old media readerships would be to pretend the world is flat. There’s little excuse for wilful ignorance.

[This article will be updated if further information comes to hand. I can be contacted privately via the contact page, or comments can be left below.]

A solution to the cake batter in my laptop?

In 1996 I felt terribly modern. My Apple Powerbook Duo was running software called Mangia!, one of the best recipe programs around at the time (alas, now dead). I had begun reading my recipes straight off the Powerbook’s screen as I cooked. That was fine until a lapse of concentration saw me pour chocolate cake batter straight onto the Powerbook’s keyboard! Quick as a flash I dropped the bowl of batter on the kitchen table and inverted the laptop. Thank goodness I was making a thick cake batter and not something really runny!

I’ve not come across a good solution for viewing recipes electronically in the kitchen and nowadays I scribble everything down on paper before embarking on a recipe. But for some people this product concept (KitchenSync) by a guy called Noah Balmer seems quite nifty. Better than an LCD screen mounted on your fridge, it’s a foldable display which can sit on your bookshelf when not in use. It’s actually a device which stores info for display, so is independent of a PC (once you’ve downloaded the information). More pics at The Kitchn.

[This is not a product endorsement. It is simply something discovered on the internet which I think is interesting.]

Amazon tastes bad

Some wonderful internet services rely on so-called ‘intelligent systems’ to keep you interested and stimulated. They guess your preferences, guide your choices, point you towards new (and lucrative) potential purchases. Perhaps the most famous such system is TiVo. Unknown in Australia except by technogeeks, TiVo is a US device that predicts which programs you will want to watch on telly. You tell it what you like (or don’t) and lo! your diet of CSI and Alias spreads like a crimewave. Your TiVo personal digital video recorder saves every imaginable analytical crime series that your 300 channels can throw at you. Your partner suffers nightmares for months thereafter.

If telly isn’t your thing, how about intelligent audio streaming? A service like Pandora lets you customise ‘stations’ of musical styles, and as the reasonably-empowered listener, you get to tell Pandora what you feel about each song it plays. It will even tell you why it chose a particular song for you. Very bright! You can discover that an affection for Santana’s Maria Maria goes hand in hand with an attraction to Craig ‘how-many-times-can-I-mention-my-name’ David. Or that loving John Paul Young’s Love is in the Air (which I do) makes you a candidate listener of Roger Wakefield. Wrong wrong wrong. Although opening Pandora’s box can cause a few surprises, you can at least berate Pandora by telling it not to play that awful track again! Nonetheless, I find myself unable to train the dear gal to play music which I regard as in some way genre-sharing with Savage Garden. Chris de Berg? Gimme a break.

TiVo is said to be a little harder to control than Pandora. If you dislike cowboy movies, there is anecdotal evidence that you might face a barage of arthouse films and a dancepartyness of Queer As Folk episodes. Realigning one’s sexual orientation with TiVo might be some sinister social experiment, but the ‘intelligence’ in the system clearly doesn’t understand that not every straight boy aspires to be John Wayne. The amusing or dissonant effect of this sort of ‘recommender system’ (as they’re called in the trade) was first highlighted in an article by Jeffrey Zaslow in the Wall Street Journal in 2002 and has become quite famous.

Notwithstanding my minor tussles with Pandora, I haven’t had to contend with any serious distorting effects of a recommender system. Until yesterday.

Amazon thinks I have a sense of humour and would buy a book by Victoria Beckham (once ‘Posh Spice’ of the Spice Girls pop group). Let me revise that. Amazon.co.uk thinks I have a taste for quirky humorous books, and thinks I should buy popular fiction, and thinks I would like a book by Victoria Beckham. So, so wrong.

The good news? This affliction probably isn’t permanent. Because I know the culprit. It’s Jamie Oliver. All I had done was give a ranking to his new tome (Cook with Jamie). Suddenly I’m meant to want a book about why penguins’ feet don’t freeze. Amazon suggests I buy Ian Rankin and John Grisham too. Ha! The only near-hit is Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. And then there’s that book by Mrs Beckham. If it were one written by her hubbie I’d be camping out front of my local bookshop in an instant.

So, Jamie has buggered up my Amazon recommendations. I’m not talking about the ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ section. Amazon customers can also view a ‘Recommendations for you’ page that develops as a result of your previous purchases, views and wishlist. Should I unrate Jamie? I might yet want to buy a Jamie book at some point (there is, however, no historical precedent). I faced a similar dilemma when a high rating of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice resulted in a few too-hands-on titles about building brick ovens and the like.

I should explain that I use Amazon almost exclusively to surf the food/cooking category. It’s a great way to keep abreast of new books (sometimes slow to reach Terra Australis), find old or unexpectedly interesting tomes, or even to buy the occasional item. Who’d have guessed? Anyway, the effect of surfing within a limited domain is that the recommendations are usually fairly acceptable. Sometimes Amazon gets a little too enthusiastic about Japanese or Persian cooking, but I can deal with it, and there was once a nasty incident when I told it I owned a book on butchery, but we won’t go there.

I’ve been looking a little more closely at the recommendations. The situation seems quite grave. A few deviant food books have also crept in. Apparently Allegra’s Colour Cookbook, Sophie Conran’s Pies and Mary Berry’s Christmas Collection are worthy of my attention. Is there happyjuice in my cordial? This isn’t Jamie’s fault.

An unlikely pair of culprits have been identified. On the one hand we have Bill Granger (Every Day). I knew there was something wrong when a guy can smile that much. And on the other is the Rose Bakery of Paris (Breakfast, Lunch and Tea). By rating these I’ve been thrown into the lifestyle end of the bookshop. I’m having visions of Donna Hay spinning spaghetti into neat little nests. Should I cook with Marie Claire? Is it time to redecorate? Do I need a makeover? If collaborative filtering (the process of predicting interests based on a range of people’s preference patterns) does this to me then I don’t want to be a team player!

Whether you’ve got £20 to spend in Top Shop or £2,000 to spend at Gucci, looking good isn’t about money, it’s about style, and style never goes out of fashion.

I wonder if the rest of Victoria’s book is as rich in insightful aphorisms. With a title more like a C-grade porno than a fashion aid, That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between (Hardcover) is not going to fulfil me culinarily. It strikes me that I’ve viewed the page for this masterpiece twice already and Amazon’s recommender system has no doubt recorded that fact for posterity. I expect the clever algorithms are now irreparably biased in pink. Am I doomed to How to Walk in High Heels: The Girl’s Guide to Everything when next I visit the ‘Recommendations for you’ page?

– DM

Links:

Cook with Jamie Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
The God Delusion Amazon US | Amazon UK
The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Allegra’s Colour Cookbook Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Sophie Conran’s Pies Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Mary Berry’s Christmas Collection Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Every Day Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Breakfast, Lunch and Tea Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Donna Hay Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Marie Claire Books for Cooks AU | Amazon US | Amazon UK
That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between (Hardcover) Amazon UK
How to Walk in High Heels: The Girl’s Guide to Everything Amazon US | Amazon UK