“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”.