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Food Blogging as Wunderkammer

More than occasionally I wonder what is food blogging and how can it continue to differ (and differentiate itself) from other media. The late-90s chestnut of blogging being “all about community” has been all but superseded by real communities moving online. As much as I’m not a huge fan of Facebook, there’s 120 million other people whom think otherwise. Then this week I came upon, this article from Julian Dibbell:

A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums — to the “cabinet of wonders,” or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid — the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Just so, the Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the “discovery” of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.

If you’re in most of the developed world, you’re bombarded with data about food: maybe food blogging is just an attempt to order it while staying in a state of constant amazement.

What makes a good food blog?

A few months ago someone asked me what makes a good food blog; a question that begs to find a common thread through the hundred or so food blogs that clog my feed reader with other people’s meals. As somebody that spends plenty of their working life measuring user behaviour on the web, I know that people’s actions are a much better measure of “goodness” than people’s intentions. If people say that they think the NY Times website is their favorite site but then spend 8 hours a day on Facebook which is the better website?

For instance, I love Converse’s This Is The Index Page campaign. It’s exactly what I wish more web marketers were doing: taking their brands less seriously and playing with the web in new and foolish ways.

I’ve been there a total of three times, once for the purpose of checking the above link. I average between eight and sixteen hours a day logged into Google. If someone asked me to name a “good” website, the Google sites wouldn’t be the ones that came to mind. Given that goodness is entirely subjective and what I say is good will be definitely the wrong answer, at the very least my online reading behaviour suggest which food blogs are good.

What I read is diverse.

There are the obvious choices. Firstly the kindred folk whom I’ve met, shared meals within their slices of Asia and whom frequently comment here. Austin Bush Photography, a few members from the crew behind Gut Feelings (where I also contribute far too sporadically), EatingAsia, Tomatom, Abstract Gourmet, Rambling Spoon. The food blogs that got me started on this crazy game like Noodlepie (currently not blogging about food) and Stickyrice (currently MIA).

The local Australian blogs that I read all have a bent towards either academe, taking the piss, or preferably both like Progressive Dinner Party or the sublimely-named Thus Bakes Zarathustra. I like The Old Foodie, if only because it is 100% history and no photos. Otherwise, I’m very slack at keeping in touch with my local blog scene. When I get a chance, I flick through whomever local has linked to me and comment at random.

I’ve got a vague side interest in the molecular which comes from Ideas in Food, and have been reading back issues of marginal academic journals like Meat Science.

From the mainstream press, the newspapers are getting more blog-like with social sharing, user commenting, or just straight down the line blogging. I read Ruhlman, Observer Food Monthly and the associated Word Of Mouth blog, Jay Rayner, AA Gill, Robert Sietsema. Anything in the New Yorker that I can get my hands on. I read glossy food magazines at random, generally whenever I’m going to pitch an article at them rather than through loyalty or habit.

What I don’t read is multitude and what seems to run through all of those blogs is a sense of myopia. The pictures emulate the short depth of field, blurred macro shots that place food in the centre of the photograph and blur the background into deep bokeh territory. The context where the food sits fades into a characterless void. It is a seductive form of food photography because it ignores the rest of the world. The chaos of culture and politics that produce food is left in that hazy background.

The writing does the same. If you solely focus upon the plate or recipe in front of you, I don’t read your blog. There is a pantheon of well-edited, professionally photographed recipe books that fill that niche for me.

A sense of context seems to be what sets apart the blogs that I read from the ones that I don’t. Good food blogging contextualizes food. It makes it feel as messy and imperfect as the world from whence it comes and not like it appeared spontaneously, teleported in fresh from Planet Donna Hay. For me the hazy background is the interesting part of a food blog’s photography and writing; it just happens to have a plate of food in it.

Last Appetite turns one.

The Last Appetite is one year old today (if you don’t count the placeholder post that I made a few months prior to real launch). In that time, I’ve eaten in six different countries, written 100-odd posts and according to my spam protection, I’ve received 4,300 spam comments.

It’s my 1004th day of food blogging since Phnomenon.com kicked off with a very bad fish amok recipe.

“Fetal bovine serum, you say”

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with bio-artist Oron Catts which probably rates as one of the strangest I’ve ever had. I used the words “fetal bovine serum” far too often for somebody who writes about food. He spoke of his work as “semi-living” where I might have used the term “undead”. His art left me with the dissonant feelings of both complete repulsion and the obsessive desire to find out more.

So this week over at SBS, I take on ethicist Peter Singer and PETA regarding their support of laboratory-grown meat. Why not take on some big targets?

It’s as goddamn weird as food gets.

Measuring web statistics for your food blog

Unless you’re going to act upon it, measuring anything is nothing more than statistical masturbation, whether it be on the web or anywhere else. There is the warm afterglow that you get from the first time that you hit a hundred; a thousand or a hundred thousand visitors to your blog a day, but once you know that people are reading your blog: then what?

Web traffic alone is meaningless without a goal attached to it. And this leads me back to the first post in this series where I asked you what is motivating you to get into the business and art of food blogging. If you don’t have a goal, there is no need to measure anything at all on your blog.

How should I measure:

Get Google Analytics for whatever blogging platform you use. It is both a blessing (it’s free! at least if you don’t count Google harvesting your rich and creamy data as a cost) and a curse (it’s so powerful that you can spend more time analysing statistics and staring like a rabbit in the headlights into an oncoming graph than you can writing about food). It’s also inaccurate; but still accurate enough for the common food blogger who doesn’t need to worry about a 25% margin for error or so.

What should I measure:

Generally:

Always measure trends

Daily bumps and spikes in web traffic are meaningless if they cannot be repeated at will or sustained. What all bloggers should aim at is growth in audience (unique visitors), average page views, time spent on site, and readers of your RSS feed over time. It will take a few months after the launch of your blog for any of these things to become apparent. In the early days you (probably) won’t have enough content or readers to make a real assessment of where your food blog is headed.

Always measure your goals

Amongst people like me who measure web traffic for a living, there is much talk about how to judge the meaningfulness of web traffic beyond just visits to your website or even “conversions” (the people who buy your product and the path by which they arrive there). If you’re not selling a product and your goals are as ephemeral as the vagaries of food blogging then what is worth measuring?

Unless you’ve read the how to start a food blog, design, and making money posts, the following goals will sound a little vague.

Specifically for food bloggers:

Goal: I want to meet people who write on the web that aren’t freaks and be a part of a community of like-minded, passionate food junkies

Most important metric: Incoming links from blogs that you respect; conversations started. And who you’ve met.

Incoming links is by far the easiest of these to quantify. Google Analytics does it under Traffic Sources > Referring Links. You can also chase up the links that have never been clicked to your site by typing site:www.yourblog.com into Google’s maw. This will output a raw number of incoming links and it’s easy enough to scan through the list to see if any blog that personally matters to you

Conversations started can encompass much more than just the number of comments on your site. The trend for blogging is that an increasing amount of the talk generated about what you write about will happen on sites other than your own: on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, on other people’s blogs and in the mainstream media. There isn’t a convenient tool yet to roll all the conversations together and come out the other side with a useful metric. When someone comes up with a widely agreed upon “conversation quotient“, I’ll be a happy web marketer. Nielsen BlogPulse is the beginning of these tools, along with Tweetscan or Summize for Twitter.

Check your address book to see who you’ve met. Poke your Facebook friends or something.

Goal:I want to make money

Most important metric: How much money you’re making.

Yes, it is that obvious.

While masses of visitors to your site will often be a proxy to how much money you’ll make (and is a direct correlation if you’re lucky enough to be paid per visit rather than per click), if you want to make money, measure what works. If you’re using Google Adsense, they include handy information on the click-through rate for each ad that you place on your site. Use this information to tweak ad placement.

Goal: I have a food business/restaurant/am a food professional and need somewhere to honestly link up with the punters/debate my awesomeness

Most important metric: Local traffic and conversions. Unless you’re running a destination restaurant that punters will fly in from all over the world to visit, the most important thing for a restaurant/locally-focussed food business is the traffic from your immediate region and how many of those people eat your food or buy your product. To measure this traffic on Google Analytics, go to Visitors > Map Overlay, click your country then use the Segment selector to segment up your national or regional audience however you choose.

Secondly, if you’re selling something, you can set up goals to measure whatever action/conversion is desired. Google can tell you more about setting goals in Analytics. Offline, you need to harvest this data wherever you can. Can you ask those who book or buy where they found out about you?

How should I act upon it:

Repeat the things that are successful. Stop doing the things that aren’t successful. If you’re tracking a goal, defining what counts as success is straightforward. Do you write posts that start more conversations than others? Could you spin them out into a monthly series? While you were building an audience did something spur a huge number of people to subscribe to your RSS feed? Could you, in good conscience, repeat it?

If you were obsessed with statistics, you could test every change to your website using multivariate analysis before you commit to any change, but for the average food blogger, it is not worth it.

Five Links on Friday – 2 May 2008

Five Links on (Good) Friday

melting icecream truck
Photo Credit: Wooster Collective