So here is a question that I woke up with this morning: would a professional chef working at a restaurant see the benefit of publishing her recipes on Key Ingredient? By using a header on her cookbook, a chef could promote her restaurant on every recipe. And the recipe could be syndicated to the restaurant website or to a blog with our widget (you’ll see it soon!). Also, the recipes could be used by others in their printed cookbooks or online collections. It’s all about making those connections, right?

So it makes sense to me, but we need someone who makes their living cooking professionally to discuss the case with us. Anyone interested out there, or know someone who may be?

As a little bonus for the tech crowd, I wanted to offer a little peek under the covers of our site to help the next bootstrapper facing a launch of a consumer facing site. One detail we all forget: we create these great sites and never teach anyone how to use them! Personally, I love screencast tours. Short of commentary and long on how-to, these little movies are worth 10,000 words. That said, how can you make them?

Well the short answer is buying some expensive tools. You can try to cobble a system together, but you will find some weird mis-matches. For example, most of the good capture tools are based on Macs. But if you want to address a consumer audience, you are stuck with Windows and IE. Face it! Okay, so we are stuck in Windows. The software I chose is Camtasia. It is basically an NLE-style movie program. Pretty basic and, as you would hope, they have great demos. A couple of rules of thumb:

• Keep them short! 3 minutes or less.
• Keep them focused. One thing at a time.
• Begin at the beginning.
• Use a real microphone!

Yes, sound is the #1 concern. It amazes me that amateur film makers and screencasters put so little effort here. If you can’t hear dialog, the whole experience is muddy. This does present a problem: how do you plug that microphone into a computer. Well for me on a Mac it was easy. But on a PC…well I’m still working on that. But I am hopeful I have a solution.

And if that works, you’ll be enjoying Key Ingredient screencasts very soon.

As many of our friends and family know, Key Ingredient is now quietly open for business!

You can search for recipes on the site, and peruse the profiles of other members without signing up. And if you would like to join us, simply select to “Add a recipe” at the top right of the page. It will jump you to the beta signup page.

Please pass out the links and have your friends check out the site!

One of the great mysteries in the Web 2.0 world is: how and when to make money for your enterprise. This has been an issue for Key Ingredient right from the start, but in a surprising way. When we were demoing the site, one of the first questions frequently was: how much does this cost? It turned out that our splash page (implemented by Emily Busey after about 20 iterations) looked “far too good to be free”.

Well, we are consumers too, and we feel that most food sites make their money by bombarding you with display ads. Literally. In fact, Recipezaar took this to such an extreme that the only path to ad-relief was to pay them. This has changed now that they are part of Scripps, but the ad density was like watching 3 televisions at once. Food Network, also part of Scripps, has toned it down some recently as well. Allrecipes was another ad blaster, since reduced after their acquisition by Reader’s Digest and subsequently by Ripplewood. So the solution to ad overload seems to be to sell to a company that doesn’t need the revenue.

But the question remains: how can you make money in a way that is reasonable both to the consumer and the site? I think the answer is to add value. By this I mean offering services that are attractive to the consumer (that includes us!) and that offer the company a sustainable revenue stream. We have created on-demand publishing services for cookbooks, we are working on our recipe transcription service (coming as soon as we can manage it), and we are working with forms of recipe sponsorship that will not destroy the calm aesthetic we have created around our recipe interface. Stay tuned.

“Are we on the air?”.

I believe these bold words began Ted Turner’s journey launching CNN. And that is sort of how it feels to write the first post on a blog and open a website that no one knows about yet. You know you are on the air, but if no one is watching, are you really broadcasting? In the case of blogging, we know the answer will be yes. Things posted today still have value tomorrow. So through other random synaptic connections involving Flickr and del.icio.us and the persistence of memory via blogging, I came to crave a web-based, recipe-centric application and community. I modestly named it Key Ingredient.

Recipes are interesting, even if they are “old”. In a world where news turns stale in minutes, recipes demonstrate persistence. They have value over time, a rarity indeed. And people like to share them and collect them and identify with them. So here we are on the first day of our invite only beta to Key Ingredient and it feels pretty good.

We think we have made new strides in applying technology to recipe content, and we are anxious to share them .. even if they are a bit hot out of the oven! In fact, we have created so many new types of tools I am going to need to devote some serious time to creating some screencasts demonstrating what we have built. We think it is pretty awesome.

And I look forward to reading this post years from now, trying to remember the echoing space that first heard this “Hello World”.