You want to tinker with that recipe you found online? Go right ahead. Anyone can edit Foodista.com, it's a wiki. It's also a comprehensive directory that links ingredients, techniques, tools and pictures. Designed and built by three local entrepreneurs, the Seattle-based site launched today.
Foodista is the brainchild of three veterans of Amazon.com, Barnaby Dorfman (ceo), Sheri Wetherell (vp editorial) and Colin Saunders (cto). Dorfman, who'd also worked at Internet Movie Database, realized that people looking for information about movies, say, tend to use the web, but that people are still inclined to use cookbooks when it comes to recipes. Sure there are a couple of big sites for cooking: allrecipes.com (based in Seattle, recently purchased by Readers Digest) and epicurious.com being the two biggest. But those sites aren't particularly user-friendly, and anything but "interactive."
So the trio came up with a different model. Their physical space is a collaborative loft in lower Queen Anne. There's no giant server platform; they use Amazon Web Services. Privately owned with no outside funding. And if the Wikipedia model of collaboration is any guide, they've got a million foodies ready to turn the wonders of cloud computing into the Next Big Thing.
By the way, if you're a blogger linking to Foodista, there's an "embed" tab on every content page that creates a link back to that page (recipe, tool, photo). For instance, this links to my Foodista profile:
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