Everyone's a Foodie

Whether I'm in a hotel for business or pleasure, I find myself browsing through all of the provided reading materials (save the Bible tucked away in a drawer). Last night, I discovered a Seattle magazine with a picture of some amazing blueberry pancakes on the cover. "Breakfast for dinner would be great," I thought to myself, yet decided on some standard room service fare instead.

Everyone, it seems, is a foodie these days. From culinary mini-classes at Williams-Sonoma to 30 Minute Meals recipe books, who doesn't think they can be the next Thomas Keller? Gourmet.com just relaunched their site, which is a clean and easy-to-navigate version of it's predecessor. It's yet another resource for everyday people to find inspiration for their upcoming meals.

Photography has played a big role in this shift. With Flickr tagging (my last "food" search yielded 2.477MM results) and sites like Tastespotting (which I have blogged about before!), culinary inspiration does not just come from the higher powers anymore. Every time I'm in the kitchen, I often have the need to grab my camera and snap a few macro shots myself.

So, maybe the person that took the blueberry pancakes picture wasn't a self-proclaimed foodie. But his/her work was enough to get me thinking about possibilities in the kitchen...and what my next brunch should look like.

Tag, You're It

Thanks to my new Canon SD850 I have been able to get back on the photo-taking bandwagon. I am also a total Flickr junkie and can get lost in the "interestingness" pretty quickly. My one issue is that I am extremely lazy with tagging, and admittedly very uncreative. For example, my recent zoo trip resulted in the following tags:

zoo
animals
San Francisco
nature

Hm. I'm not sure people are going to be coming in droves to view my pictures, but "zoo" is listed as one of the top all-time tags on Flickr. (As a side note, "macromondays" is another Hot Tag that I found on Flickr. I will definitely be checking those out.)

While Flickr continues to build its database of tags and categories, other sites have been following suit and trying to get their users to label their information. ThisNext, a social shopping site that I have mentioned in a previous post, has launched a tagging initiathat encourages users to label items with "lux".




















I think is a great promotion that will increase membership on ThisNext.com, and also build community around products that are truly "lux". It would be great to see eLuxury (and other brands) start to view tagging as a marketing tool. By leveraging tagging, a tool that people on the site will use anyway, eLuxury could also further associate their brand with the luxury goods that they offer (a true differentiating factor when compared to other e-commerce sites).