It is quite bizarre how many restaurant websites use flash technology. It was quite clear at Restaurant08 during my panel session on the internet with chef Raymond Capaldi, Mark Armstrong from Google, Julia Topliss from Web Prophets that none of us like it (and Google has trouble finding sites with it). And we’re not the only ones. Social media commentator Laurel Papworth hates it too and finds this quote: “Flash-based web sites are quite possibly one of the most useful […]
Ideas for the digital world
13 ways for restaurants to get lucky in Google searches. Or why they must learn to love food blogs
If you haven’t noticed most people find your website or blog through Google. Yes, it may be through Yahoo! But until somebody comes up with something better Google is king. The reason why restaurants or any other small or medium sized business need to take notice of blogs is that very probably a blog will come higher up in search results than you. This is unless the Google search is for your website name alone. In reality, it may be […]
Turning clicks into cash
The Australian, Entrepreneur DARREN Rowse is an accidental entrepreneur. The Melbourne-based lay preacher has earned more than $700,000 from internet advertising since 2003 simply by working out what people want to read on the internet. Now he runs the B5Media Network of 320 bloggers with co-founders Shai Coggins from Adelaide and Jeremy Wright from Toronto after 18 months ago raising $US2 million in venture capital. Mr Rowse was an internet amateur when he started blogging in 2002 after a friend […]
Exclusive: Ferran Adria says blogs are the big food revolution
Thanks to Matt Preston, creative director of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, for sharing his exclusive from El Bulli’s Ferran Adria: I caught up with Mr Adria and a few journos at MadridFusion08 in Jan. His opening response was to a question about what the big changes in food were this year. His answer was translated from Spanish so there may be nuances missed by the translator but the inference was that there has been a explosion in blogs. […]
42 49 reasons why Melbourne is the top food blogging City in the southern hemisphere
Updated 20.3.07 and hopefully all links working. Any missing please let me know. I think this list of 42 is fairly comprehensive but inevitably there are a couple of local food blogs lurking out there that I haven’t found. There are many more local food blogs out there but they haven’t been updated for months or years. When I started blogging in July 2005 there were barely 30 food blogs locally. Now there are about 100 active ones in Australia. […]
We need your menu inspiration for modern artist
Julie Poulson is looking for inspiration Inflation is the bain of artist Julie Poulson’s life; pie and coke now costs $4.80. Nevertheless she is beavering away creating works for her exhibition in Cairns opening on 9 March. Her current work is ” Mango cheeks $14 a box” is taken from roughly painted roadside signs, printed, painted and assembled through stitching. Her work Hot Dog Fries is hung in the modern Italian restaurant Vivos in Palm Cove in far north Queensland. […]
The Gordon Ramsay nightmare
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlhJF7qVcNA]
Great wine advice for restaurants
Veteran food writer Rita Erlich talks good sense in The Age over absurdly long wine lists. Giant wine tomes are best avoided: “Even a speed-read list would help – say, a dozen whites and reds, chosen because they’re appropriate drinking and fairly priced. The longer the list, the higher the individual bottle prices, since stocking the cellar with thousands of bottles is expensive. Neither do I have much time for the wine list full of big company wines, available at […]
Food fight
Yes, there are two good fight stories out there. Cuccina Rebecca in Sydney was asked to stop taking pics of her food “because the owner does like it” as someone once tried to take a picture of the blackboard. Silly restaurant paranoi perhaps. Many chefs do take food photos for ideas but this was a bowl of pasta. But it’s not as paranoid as the restaurants that refuse the critic entry. That’s right in Melbourne they have barred the way […]