… for the discerning chewer between Petrus Wine Gummy Pastilles and Havanna eVape drags.
This was originally intended as a comment on Rocky Agrawal‘s (@rakeshlobster) piece on VentureBeat titled “Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers“. Then Disqus hickupped again (still asking me why I am not using third party commenting?) so I am posting it here.
CPM of $20 or $200 doesn’t matter. Restaurants operate on sub-10% margins, “stabbed ten times” is about as painful as “stabbed 30 times” in this case.
The Yelp business model is simple: to most restaurateurs and – I can only presume – other non-tech businesses anything with that level of technology is indistinguishable from magic. And, the 2010s being what they are, a magical miracle is what many small business owners are waiting/hoping for.
This image has nothing to do with the post, I just figured I’d show the final functionality. It was uploaded with WordPress’ image uploader but synced in the back to Dropbox and is now served from there.
Since deciding to leave Flickr I was pondering a way to store my images offsite (Dropbox or S3 or similar), display them here for the time being, and maybe migrate to something else in the longer run. This morning while waiting in a cafe to get some work done I sat down and hacked this little tool together. It’s by no means exhaustive and it’s clearly very hackish but it does two things I wanted – it gives me a way to “rescue” my Flickr images to Dropbox or S3 and serve them without having to change the URLs inside the blog. And it also gives me a chance to do right from now on and simply work as I used to but slowly migrate as needed.
Food media is at it, again, this time (as every year) in the “shorties”, the annual event “honor[ing] the best of social media”.
Winner in food is, currently, Niall Horan, a 18 year old singer. And, funnily enough, a namesake of his from Dublin.
He’s also the “hottie of the year” (seriously?), a “hero” (10s of thousands of cops, military members, doctors, EMT, and others laugh in disgust), a singer (funny if your chosen profession gets MUCH less votes than your ability to eat things) and “green”.
Down at 4th place is Hannah, the genius behind “My Drunk Kitchen“, the “Epic Meal Time” crew at 5th, and (ewww) Bitchin’ Kitchen which, while an abomination upon mankind and as disgusting as McDonalds or Roadkill Cafe at least deals with food.
Ladies, gentlemen, this is why we can’t have anything nice in this world. When idiotic teen heartthrob singers can get more recognition in #food than weird cooking videos, the world is screwed.
noma
I am as thrilled as most of my brothers and sisters in the service of ideas and cuisines that have now become arranged under the monicker of New Nordic that Plate decided to dedicate a whole print issue to the topics we deal with every day.
What I am a little confused about is the “why now” part of the equation. It’s not like it’s new. Sure, noma’s success has propelled the idea into the stratosphere, not the least due to Rene’s ceaseless work in formulating the rules of the cuisine along with giving it a name, but this kind of food isn’t new. In fact, it’s been around for so long, might as well just call it Nordic Cuisine and be done with it.
Japanese Friendship Garden, San Jose
my first ever upload to flickr - Feb. 2004
I’d heard it a day before it happened which was 18 hours (no joke) too late to not extend my pro account on flickr: Yahoo just laid off its CSR staff for the photo sharing property. Officially that’s to consolidate customer service groups but, hey, if you want to alienate what few non-mom-and-pop users are left using the service daily then you’ve come to the right place, Yahoo!
I get it. Flickr is an anachronism inside the “media company” restructuring of Yahoo. It’s a service that appeals not to my mother (well, she uses it but not for its features but because I am on it) but to me. It appeals less to people who want a wedding album or their P&S pictures from last week’s BBQ and more to those who tweak HDR until it looks like the world looked to me during my six weeks acid binge.
I’ve started writing some scripts to “rescue” my data from the service (which, not surprisingly, is made more complicated than it has to be). My first ever picture was uploaded during Etech 2004 a few minutes after Stewart unveiled the idea (which, back then, was a flash application to “flick” photos to people). I am sure that a closed, misbehaving, service wasn’t the idea before Yahoo took over. But now that it is I have to run. But where to? Any ideas?
Talking about “loyalty” is a hot topic these days. And most people have their own idea what it means. In restaurant terms it’s anything from customers telling friends to go, customers who defend “their” restaurant on blogs, networks, and forums, and customers coming back. To CNET, apparently, “loyalty” means to have images loading enabled. Which I don’t. So their little tracking bug 1-pixel won’t tell them if I read their emails or no. So under the subject line of “Is this goodbye? We’ll miss you…” I got this niftily aggressive note about being a stranger. Does it make me want to come back? Not really. But, of course, email is cheap…
People are outraged now that President Obama appointed none other than former Monsanto lobbyist and flag carrier of the GMO movement, Michael Taylor, to food czar – more than two years ago. Sometimes it takes a little waiting… And well they should be. But not for the reasons everyone cries.
True, Taylor is a GMO advocate. Taylor pushed an agenda which allowed companies like Cargill and Monsanto to deploy genetically modified crops and to – in steps two to five – use those genetics and their patents to sue small farms out of everything they had, essentially creating a monopoly.
Also true, this isn’t Taylor’s first stint with the goverment and while the USDA Food Safety guy he swung big words but implemented scarcely any actual changes, despite Marion Nestle’s blog claiming the opposite a few years back.
But that’s just the particulars. The true issue here is with the administration’s repeated and anger-inducing push to put industry insiders into a watchdog’s place. Anyone ever working (or being a “guest” of) a prison knows that, yeah, you let some inmates do some jobs that allow them to interface with their kind and you, but the guys with the guns better not be of the general population kind. Obama just gave a gun to the guy who drinks wine with the prison’s most notorious inmate overlord every weekend.
Tour De Food
