Creative Tech and the Foodie Blogosphere

When I’m not working my day job as a palace concierge, I write a stealthy little food blog from here in Paris. Women’s Wear Daily even named me, with dubious miscalculation, the "Hottest Food Blogger in Paris." I get along with a few tools that basically allow me to record/remember meals, research, write, and connect with other like-minded people.

My iPhone 3GS is indispensable to take notes and pictures. For anything more serious I’ll use my three year old Sony Cybershot.

Lately, I’ve been toting a Flip Ultra video camera. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, totally no frills, and even a monkey could use it (hence perfect for me.) It’s light, robust, cheap, and connects easily to my computer through the USB port. Last and most important is my new MacBook Pro which ties everything together and enables me to reach a finished product in style.

With the advent of food blogs and forums such as eGullet and chowhound, it seems that everyone’s an expert. But as cool as this new media is, it can muddy the water a little when everybody’s Zagat-ing it out and proclaiming themselves as the newest mealtime Messiah.

Like my fellow blogger and friend Meg Zimbeck says, "The internet and blogging have increased the number of voices and amount of information available to such an extent that the real challenge today for readers/eaters is to know how to filter that information and know which voices they can trust." So, we both use Google Reader to follow our favorite blogs and filter out the dross.

Another fellow friend and foodie star, Louisa Chu, of Movable Feast sings the praises of Twitter: "I - like most people - now find Twitter indispensable to socialize with other food friends, but also to monitor food trends. It's amazing how often one chef friend in San Francisco or Seattle will tweet about something - only to have it immediately followed by a completely independent tweet on the same subject by a food writer friend in New York or London - and then again out of the blue from Paris or Sydney or Hong Kong."

In general, more generic social media sites like Facebook are pretty useless to me except for hitting up chefs for interviews, editors for work or for connecting with exotic food lovers I don’t know yet, but would like to. All those LinkedIn invitations are annoying as hell. And don’t even get me started on MySpace, or any other site that blasts you with music.