Week 4: Discover a Hobby

                Thing #9: Web 2.0 Food Sites

URBANSPOON

                http://www.urbanspoon.com

                If you’re a food fan, UrbanSpoon is a great place to get reviews of restaurants in your area. When you go to the site, it should automatically detect what part of the country you are in (it isn’t always accurate, however, as it keeps mistaking Marcellus for Witchita!), but you can choose another location by clicking “More . . .” on the yellow bar that lists cities, choosing your state, and narrowing down your location from there. You can sign up for a free UrbanSpoon account and contribute all kinds of content – write reviews, keep a list of favorite restaurants, contribute pictures, make friends, and even supply information for restaurants in the area that aren’t yet listed in UrbanSpoon.

                Let’s look at an example of a restaurant page on UrbanSpoon. Use the search box to look for “daniel’s grill”. At the top, you’ll see their address and a percentage of how many people voted that they like this restaurant. If you scroll down, you can get some reviews by customers (most are nice, but some are downright angry!), and you can also get a listing of places nearby. Some restaurant listings are more detailed than others. For example, try searching “cosmo’s pizza” and you’ll see they have the hours listed, type of food, and average cost per entre; if you look up “francesca’s”, there are comments on the type of atmosphere in the restaurant; and if you look at “ichiban” there are pictures of some of the meals, and you can view their website and menu. UrbanSpoon is a good example of the reason why Web 2.0 is both helpful and a little unhelpful at the same time: sure, you can see information on all those restaurants in town (which theoretically is great if you’re on vacay and don’t know the area), but at the same time, the content is contributed by interested people, although it is overseen by the site managers, so there can be a lot of holes in the information.

I’M COOKED

                http://www.imcooked.com/

                This is another Web 2.0 food site, but their twist is that when people sign up for free accounts, they can upload recipes and videos of how to make different dishes. You can make friends and exchange recipes, or you can just sit back and enjoy others’ contributions. For example, for some reason actor Christopher Walken has contributed a video on how to roast a chicken! Let’s watch: http://www.imcooked.com/view_video.php?viewkey=5ff68e3e25b9114205d4

                Thing #10: WikiHow

WIKIHOW

                http://www.wikihow.com/

                This is my personal go-to site when I want to know how to do something. I have typed in all sorts of subjects and have yet to stump WikiHow – there are articles on everything! Some of the featured articles, for example, are “How to get your husband to help around the house,” “How to know if a woman is a cougar,” and “How to make Aaloo Ki Tikki.”

                The thing I like most about this site is the way the articles are structured. Keep in mind it’s Web 2.0, so anyone can contribute content; but the pages are all structured the same clean, neat way, which makes things much easier to comb through. If you use the search box to look up “how to write haiku”, you’ll see that the results page always has four ad links at the top, followed by the actual WikiHow results. You’ll also notice that several thousand results show up, but you’ll usually find the most relevant articles within the first few pages. Once you click on an article, you’ll see an introduction to the topic, then instructions laid out usually in 10 or 15 steps, followed by some special tips at the bottom and sometimes a how-to video. Almost all of WikiHow’s articles are laid out this way, which is a definite advantage when you want specific instructions that are quick and easy to follow. Some of the articles also have warnings, and at the bottom there is a list of related articles you can browse through for more information.

                Bonus: For another great site about how stuff works, go to http://www.howstuffworks.com/. This is a good way to get easy-to-understand information on the latest tech gadgets.

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