Mining the Social Web

Slicing and Dicing Recipes (for the Health of It)

Since Google’s Rich Snippets initiative took off, there’s been an ever-increasing awareness of microformats, and many of the most popular foodie websites have made solid progress in exposing recipes and reviews with hRecipe and hReview. Consider the potential for a fictitious online dating service that crawls blogs and other social hubs, attempting to pair people together for dinner dates. One could reasonably expect that having access to enough geo and hRecipe information linked to specific people would make a profound difference in the “success rate” of first dates. People could be paired according to two criteria: how close they live to one another and what kinds of foods they eat. For example, you might expect a dinner date between two individuals who prefer to cook vegetarian meals with organic ingredients to go a lot better than a date between a BBQ-lover and a vegan. Dining preferences and whether specific types of allergens or organic ingredients are used could be useful clues to power the right business idea. While we won’t be trying to launch a new online data service, we’ll get the ball rolling in case you decide to take this idea and run with it.

The Food Network is one of many online sites that’s really embracing microformat initiatives for the betterment of the entire Web, exposing recipe information in the hRecipe microformat and using the hReview microformat for reviews of the recipes.^[11] This section ...