December 20, 2005
quick blogging questions
Thank you very much for your help! I've closed the comments as I'm pretty much done with my essay...and it's only around 1:30 AM. GREAT. YEAH, I suck worse than that crappy parfait I had at Whole Foods.
The procrastinator in me needs to die.
Quick, easy questions about blogging that would best be answered by tomorrow because they would help me with my essay (although the other comments on my other entry helped a lot too). You're all pretty quick with commenting, which is lovely.
...Oh god, we're all addicted to blogs. Maybe it's not so lovely:
- FOOD BLOGGERS: Why do you blog? Why did you start a blog? Be a concise or elaborate as you wish/your boredom permits. I could suggest answers but I don't want to put ideas in your head. Obviously though, we all like food, so perhaps something that goes beyond that.
- FOOD BLOG READERS (which includes bloggers): Why do you read food blogs? Again, elaborate, concise, doesn't matter, although it probably goes beyond a love for food because I know a lot of people who love food and don't read a million blogs...but as I said, we're addicted. I don't want to know why you read my blog in particular, but the food blogosphere as a whole.
I guess I should answer these questions? If anyone's curious...
I write a blog because I must be partially obsessed with documentation. A difference between my blogging habits and other people's blogging habits (although I could be wrong) is that I have a gazillion blogs and website. Okay, not a gazillion, but I was just thinking the other day how so many food blogs were affected by the brief typepad suicide. I was wondering why so many people use typepad and it's because they have...a single blog, for the most part. I hoard so much crap online and only last year did I decide to organize the hoarding (hoarganizing), splitting my main blog into this food blog, a music blog, and the too-oft-updated livejournal of brainfarts. When I die, you'll still find a gazillion pages with "roboppy" on them. Hot damn, I'll be immortalized on the web! Wait, that's creepy.
I don't know if that answered the question. Er. Well, I like meeting new people, obviously. I don't take part in the community blogging events though, which kind of goes in line with my lack of community involvement in real life. I like having a small group of friends, although in reality I have very few friends...in close proximity. That also explains my tendency to blog and build relationships that way. If my life were busier, I wouldn't be able to blog this much.
Another thing is that I want to publicize food that I really like, or those that I don't. This is more important if I come across some great hole-in-the-wall or a really delicious cake that "no one" knows about. There are lots of places in NYC that probably deserve more attention and I want to help...erm, bring more attention to them. This goes in line with the obsession to document everything.
I like complaining. If I ate an army's worth of food and live (half consciously) to tell the tale, you will hear it.
I like hearing from other people that I'm not alone in my habits of eating enough food to feel small countries or enough sugar to kill most bacteria/humans, among other things. I really love getting comments.
And I suppose I'm a lot more egotistical than I think I am. It's not that I think my thoughts are so read-worthy, but it would be sad if I didn't think anyone else wanted to read them.
As for why I read blogs, it's a way for me to find new places to eat, to read great food writing for free, and to take part in culinary tourism from my butt-numbing chair. I'd say more but I think I have to go to work now. I was supposed to start at 1PM but the DOOR WAS LOCKED and I have yet to learn how to pick locks or walk through walls.
Posted by roboppy at 1:04 PM
Comments (8)
I started my food blog as a way to revive my interest in my domain. I bought it over five years ago at this point (my God, it's hard to believe I've been designing web sites for over seven years...), and it had always been a pretty typical personal domain. After a while, it got really dull maintaining a site that was about nothing more than myself. Really, I'm not an especially dynamic person. At least, I don't think so. And so it got to the point where I was completely ignoring the site for weeks and even months at a time.
When I moved into an apartment here at Stony Brook, I knew I'd have a kitchen and be cooking regularly. Since I've been cultivating an ever-growing passion for food preparation of basically any kind over the past year-and-a-half or so, I got the idea to gear my site towards documentation of my culinary experiments.
While that definitely helped with the updating-almost-never thing, it wasn't until I stumbled upon your site that it really turned into a full-blown food blog. Mostly because I didn't know there was such a thing until finding this here one. ;] I had the brilliant idea of freezing pudding one night, and before I did so (because I'm not like my sister who will just experiment with food and not care if it winds up a disaster and must be thrown out--I actually despise wasting anything, especially food) I wanted to be sure it was possible to wind up with edible results. When I put "frozen pudding" into a search, an entry of yours that mentioned eating frozen pudding was one of the results.
From there, I read a lot of your entries and found your site very entertaining. And I can really relate to a lot of the things you've written about. It inspired me to try and incorporate a bit of the old "personal" aspect of my domain back into what had become rather impersonal records of recipes I tried and photographed. And thus, my food blog was born!
As for why I read food blogs, I checked out some of the ones you had linked and picked a handful that were my favorites. The writers all have different styles and voices, locations, and individual tastes. It offers me varying perspectives on food and cooking, and it's giving me kind of like...background information to keep in mind when I start my own baking business. I like the variety of perspectives out there in the food blogging realm.
With that, I think I'll wrap up this long-winded comment. ;]
I write for a living, mostly corporate stuff like annual reports, newsletters and brochures. I started my blog so I could have a space to write about other things. To practise more, so to speak, so I'll not wake up one day and find I've lost the ability to describe and express my own thoughts. And since I work from home, I cook so much at home, I thought it'd be fun to document what I cook. And I like taking pictures.
As for reading food blogs, i think it extends from my appetite for food magazines. Because I cook at home much and I like variety when it comes to food, I buy way too many food mags for new recipes. I like looking at beautiful food pictures too. Who doesn't, right? Food blogs work the same way for me too. And I like to see what and how people eat, how and where they live. Admittedly, it's voyeurism and tourism all at once.
Hope this helps.
OMG.. Robyn is using us to cheat on her class work! j/k. :p
I don't write food blogs, or any blogs for that matter and I barly keep a journal. But I guess I do keep up w/ blogs/food blogs.
Why I read this one in particular has a few reasons.
1) It is entertaining. A lot of other food blogs just decribe how the food tasted. Whether it had a sweet hint of something or the moistness of such and this. I don't want to listen to how someone had a better food experience than I had. I want them to say BISCUITS OF DOOM! =D Reading a "formal" food blog (ie. Alton Brown's) is dry .. like over baked roast. There's no redeming value.
2) I live in NYC. For better or worse, I'm stuck in this god-forsaken city. I'd figure I might as well make the most of it and sample what the city has to offer. I know there's a ton of restaurants, especially downtown, but since I live 150+ blocks from downtown, I don't go down there as often as I would like. Reading your blog gives me perspective on a number of restaurants that I would like to try if/when I have company in town and/or someone could accompany me down for some fooding.
I originally started looking into food blogs just because I was bored at work and well, frankly staring at delicious food was "work safe". Also I haven't frequented nearly as many restaurants and I needed perspective on smaller places that "guides" and "reviews" weren't providing. Finally, while i'm not on a tight budget, its nice to have fooding through the eyes of a student who is conscious of costs to benefit ratio. Many people go for expensive food translating expense = good food. I don't really go for that.
Also, the fact that you're asian didn't hurt since that means you're not picky. I just don't go for food blogs that's say exclusively vegen. As I read your blog further, I realized that we have similar tastes, although, you do eat a lot more baked goods than I.
Posted by: Wei at December 21, 2005 10:38 AM [#]
I enjoy food. Watching cooking shows on tv, finding new recipes and blogging its just an extention of that. And luckily I have met some nice people because of that. I just think food brings people together. There are happy memories associated with a favorite dish or holiday.
I'm a scholarly source. (Well, a scholar and a source, anyway. But I don't study food so I'm no help there.)
I started my blog to share things I do with friends and family who live far away. I wanted them to see what I'm up to. I didn't intend for it to be just food at first but that's how it seems to be turning out.
My blog reading has pretty much replaced my Food Network watching. I really prefer knowing about what real people eat, plus I feel like I know the bloggers in a way that I don't know the celebrity chefs. Aside from Good Eats, I never watch cooking shows any more.
It's not surprising that there are no journal articles about food blogging. It takes academics a while to figure out new things, and after that it takes a while for new work to be published. And I would like to read your essay even if you think it's lousy, but I understand if you'd rather not share it.
I'm in IT, and I took a sabbatical from my job (people think loooong and hard before you do this because it's not easy going back) to take culinary lessons and to become a chef. Well to make a long story longer... I've found that I love making nice food, looking at nice food, and eating nice food, I blog about it to keep my friends up to date.
I read food blogs mainly because there are so many people who can make amazing food, who can give chefs in the industry a run for their money (the business is pretty cut throat, male dominated...and gossips abound *men are such gossips in the kitchen!*) I enjoy reading about what people make in their own kitchen, or what they eat, what kind of food is out there.
I started my blog for several reasons:
1) I wanted a presence on the blogosphere (read: up with pop culture).
2) As an outlet for any daily stress I might build up.
3) As a way to express my thoughts on dining out in the city...also to have a place to do so.
4) Become a part of a community, in this case, a food blogging community.
Posted by: Michael Mahle at December 21, 2005 10:26 PM [#]
: This is the 
I started blogging so my immediate circle of friends would know what I was up to. I sort of thought of blogging as long emails to my friends about my day, what I did, what I was up to.
Then I realised bloggging was a good way to sort of create a "permanence" to all my experiences. Hence I started logging in 2005 all books, movies, travels, restaurants experienced.
I didn't mean for my blog to be a "food blog" but it sort of ended up being that way since most of what I write about is food anyway (where I eat, what I cooked, etc). And since in the Philippines (where I'm from) there are very few article written about hole-in-the-wall restaurants I've received a few readers who stumbled upon my blog by Googling certain restaurants.
Similarly, I like reading food blogs mostly to get ideas on what to cook, where to eat, what to try out. It's interesting because in the Philippines there is so little publicly available information on everything (markets, ingredients, etc) so one really has to rely on their favorite food bloggers' recommendations.
Posted by: wysgal at December 20, 2005 8:22 PM [#]