by Michelle Lentz

Seattle has a handle on coffee – and apparently food-oriented web sites. A lot of popular foodie web sites, including Allrecipes.com and UrbanSpoon are located in that fair city, and now they can add Foodista to the list.

Foodista is, at its core, Wikipedia for recipes. I’m not sure how I feel about it. One thing I love about Allrecipes and its ilk is that there are usually several different versions of a given recipe. After all, we all make eggnog differently.

Foodista co-founders are Barnaby Dorfman and Sheri Wetherell. Dorfman is a previous VP of Amazon’s A9 Search group. Additionally, Colin Saunders, a former Amazon developer is involved. The team started building the site in April, creating a rather large repository so that the site would have a nice starting point at launch. (I wish all new sites would do that.)

I signed up for an account and added a recipe for Egg Nog (yum!). It took my basic recipe and prettied it up. That includes adding hyperlinks to each ingredient – you know, in case you want to make your own ice cream for the recipe. Additionally, it allowed me to choose from a selection of Flickr photos related to Egg Nog.

Since I also blogged about nog on my Wine Blog, I was able to link that post to the Foodista entry. Foodista provides a nice link back to my blog post as well, similar to how Urban Spoon links restaurant review posts. I’m a big fan of this convention.

Finally, it has a brief definition of Egg Nog, pulled from Wikipedia, and a comments section, adding to the interactivity.

Now that I’ve entered this egg nog recipe, someone else can edit it, change it, and make comments. It’s an interesting concept. Collaborative recipes are sort of a new thing – most of the chefs I know are rather possessive of their recipes. It’s a neat idea; we’ll see where it takes them.

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