My Social Bookmarking Soulmate

Jonathan Milder may not know it, but we are social bookmarking soul mates. I hope I am not coming off too strong! He has many tags that are on the topic of food culture, some of them include “trends,” “health,” and “culture.” By looking at his tag cloud he has many more tags that are relevant to the topic of food, which seems as if it could be overwhelming, but his tags are organized. The tags that my blog would benefit from include the names of different types of cuisines, like “Korean,” “African” and “Middle Eastern” and he includes tags that are for reviews, critics, and even Zagat reviews.  This sounds like the case of love at first sight.

            So how many tags does he got? Well let’s just say he has one tag that is as low as 1, but he has other tags as high as 2000. Many other tags range from 300-600. His last three tags were on February 28, 2014 and if I keep scrolling down he tags very often. This works in my favor because he has recent tags and tags as early as 2010. Finding some scholarly articles about my topic that is recent was a bit difficult to find, so this is a great resource.

            I was clicking on a lot of what he’s got, but I started with the articles under his “zagat” tag. One article was from the Huffington Post about Zagat’s Top 2012 restaurants in America. The article was more about how diners were actually dining less. So that was not what I was expecting.  Another Zagat page was about how Google bought Zagat for their Google+Local feature. As it turns out Google wanted to compete with websites like Yelp and so they bought Zagat. Zagat, known for their accurate ratings of quality restaurants failed to display that on the Google platform. There were many restaurants that had the incorrect information displayed on the Google+Local. This is intriguing.

            I looked more at Mr. Milder’s tags and most of them spark my own personal interests, and others were spot on with my topic. To backup the argument that globalization has allowed local restaurant businesses thrive with the cuisine from different countries around the world I have found articles that talk about ethnic and fusion restaurants. One article I found highlights the up and coming Filipino cuisines. It mentions that as Americans have tasted the Korean and Thai food and have grown accustomed to it. With the interests Americans have of Asian food flavors there is a demand for more. (Americans are always wanting more!) Filipino food is now in.

            Jonathan Milder has a lot of bookmarks that are harmonious with my topic. There is a lot for my own personal interest and I am sure others would find fascinating as well. His bookmarks would add recent data for my blog so I can stay relevant on my topic.

Hooked on Yelp

 

There’s my hook. Hope I got your attention in the corniest way possible.

The cool thing about social media is that you can brag to your audience about your awesome life. Then your audience will double tap to like, comment, or whatever they do.  Now I use the term audience because, well you know as well as I do, you hate most of the people you’re “friends” with. You click on their profile to look at that one bad photo they have or you visit people’s profiles because you’re bored with your own life and you have nothing better to do.  Now is that the really cool thing about social media? We have the ability to connect and build relationships with people from all over the world and we click on the person’s profile we went to high school with to snicker about their current lifestyle. That’s low.

Now, I don’t mean to make you feel bad about yourself, I am no better than you are. I just wanted to draw attention to the way we sometimes use social media.Think about some other ways we use social media. I think we also use it is to visit websites that rate businesses such as restaurants. Being a human being that loves food more than life itself I use websites like yelp a lot. Sometimes I go on yelp and just browse! People post the most delicious photos of food and they capture the ambiance of the restaurant in words. Because of yelp I am able to “shop” for a restaurant and when I visit the restaurant I know exactly what to order because people on yelp have given me recommendations.

Guisados Tacos

Photo by Roland L.

I become the know it all. All of the knowledge that I have gathered from yelp about the restaurant has made me the expert. Everyone in my group that I am dining with looks up to me for advice on what to order and they thank me because I had helped them put the best food into their little belly. It feels oh so good.

Yelp is cool, resourceful, and creates a fan base for a particular restaurant. It’s the way social media should be used—connecting and bringing people of similar interests.  But, to every pro there’s a con; unfortunately everyone that comments is…well… not the most intelligent people. As an avid Yelp user that goes on to read reviews it’s infuriating to come across reviews like the ones below:

Urth Café

Kody M. writes

“We got vanilla latte's which were pretty good, but for.our food that we got to go took 40 minutes and it was just a turkey sandwich and soup. Lousy service.”

Bestia

T.T. writes

“What is all this hype all about? 
The food was nothing special, I'd even say below average. Every single dish ordered was significantly (!) over-salted, my pappardele pasta was overcooked and was falling apart. The pizza's that were being baked in front of us looked burnt. The crowd wasn't interesting either. 
I liked our waiter and the atmosphere of a busy restaurant, but seriously, the place is nothing to write home about.”

This is why we can’t have nice things! People who are unfamiliar about seasoned foods or who go to a café (known for their drinks by the way) and wait forever for “Just a turkey sandwich” are disappointed and rant about it on yelp. Social media has so much potential, but it gets ruined from people like the above. 

I think Aziz says it best : ‪@azizansari

There needs to be a new Yelp feature to help accurately assess ethnic restaurants - "Remove white ppl reviews."

 So if you yelp, yelp with a purpose, write a thorough review that people will appreciate. That’s what its for right? Let’s get the nice things back!