This post from Benblog articulates something that’s been bugging me for a while – that while <sarcasm>folksonomic wittering of the kind beloved of us “social software professionals”</sarcasm> is all very well, it’s still a solution in search of a problem to a large extent.
The idea of tagging recipes with ingredient keywords – so something that contained eggs, mushrooms and falael, say, would be tagged up accordingly – is the best one I’ve heard yet. In fact you could take it further and tag with cooking methods, or presentation style, or complexity of preparation, or any variety of factors. So rather than staring blankly at a cupboard containing a jar of olives, two tins of butter beans and an Oxo cube, I could run a search on all those ingredients and the fact that tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Gordon F*****g Ramsey – and end up with a relevant recipe.
There are some software applications out there that do similar things (or at least allow you to search on ingredients) but these are limited to the recipes that you’ve keyed in. What would be much more useful would be a folksonomic overlay on top of existing sites like Epicurious. In fact, let’s go one further and have epi.curio.us. One for the Lazyweb, perhaps?
Your post highlights a problem. I didn’t know that falafel could be spelt that way. Which would somewhat limit my ‘hits’ unless the software also went in for a bit of fuzzy matching as well.
Actually I think the solution to that may be in the problem – if the individual recipes are being tagged with multiple words, there’d be a broad range of options for a search to hit. We could both tag the same ingredient with different spellings leading ultimately to the same result.
There’s certainly a requirement for partial searches on keywords, though – but I guess that’s the same for any folksonomy, regardless of topic…
When you get a chance, check out BigOven, at http://www.bigoven.com. It allows this kind of tagging, and lets you search by ingredient, arbitrary recipe tag (e.g., “kid friendly”, “spicy”, “vegetarian”, etc.), cuisine, main ingredient, and more…