The storage system that Key Ingredient uses to store images, Amazon’s S3, is currently having some trouble. Because of this, a large number of recipe photos and user icons are not available.

Rest assured, your content is safe and will be back online soon. Amazon’s S3 service has been very reliable and situations like this are very rare. Even so, we are investigating ways to combine resources with S3 to ensure hiccups like this don’t happen in the future.

Also, if you are trying to log in and the login page looks a little strange–not to worry, you can still log in as normal :)

Update:

Key Ingredient is back to full strength. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

Interesting tidbit: a top search item on Google yesterday was burrito. We’ve seen research that says consumers prefer the Internet for recipe search to any other medium. This seems to back that up .. along with “hangover” being a top search as well!

The rub here is that we believe people want to search for recipes online, but they want to find and collect them even more more. Makes sense to me. That’s why I have piles of clippings of recipes in a box. In the ad-driven online world, the relationship ends with a consumer finding what they are looking for. It puts recipes sites and consumers at odds: sites make money off of multiple searches; consumers want to find the perfect recipes as soon as possible. Seems backwards. Consumers want to find recipes and save them, maybe even modify them to their taste. That’s what Key Ingredient is all about.

How do we stay in business? We add value. The next step in having a recipe collection is sharing it. We can help with our widget and on-demand custom cookbooks. Cookbooks are the perfect gift and our widget can earn bloggers addition money from embedded advertising (still in the works). With Key Ingredient finding a recipe is the beginning of a relationship, not the end. That makes more sense to us as a company and as customers.

Well all great things start small, and this great thing has been a long time coming! Below is our recipe widget that we have been working on for quite some time. Why use it? Well, it turns a recipe from simple unstructured text into a nicely formatted object. This allows a reader to save your recipe into their collection, email it to a friend or print a nicely formatted page. In addition, saving it will keep a permanent link to the original blog post that they got it from, even if they modify the recipe to their own tastes. It creates a legacy of credit that is nice for everyone.

The widget also will update any changes that you make to the recipe on Key Ingredient. We are really excited about this new tool and look forward to getting bloggers to give it a spin!

A couple of caveats:

>The recipe embed code (a button to the right of the recipe marked Blog This) has to be added in Wordpress with the visual editor shut off. Don’t really know why, but this is the same issue in Wordpress for embedding YouTube videos.

>I’ve added some styling before the embed code to push the widget off of the left edge of the blog. I added <p style=”margin-left:100px> before the embed code and a </p> after it. This styling pushes the widget to the right of your blog posting area by 100 pixels. You can move it further right by increasing the value and to the left by decreasing it. With no styling, the widget will appear flush left.

More soon and looking for feedback!

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.