What better model do we have for open sourcing (besides the cost of the books) than cookbooks? Programming books, not unlike the 242 at O’Reilly, proudly use the metaphor made famous by Betty*. Those books capture much of the commonly agreed upon principles, standard methods, and terminology… but they are just the beginning. Communities spring up around sharing and improving applications that begin with the cookbook recipes.

You’d think that a model that came long before the Web would have flourished by now, but real recipe hacking hasn’t really blossomed. Sure, you can search and store recipes, but the wiki or digg-like communities of participation haven’t formed in mature ways. What might a mature one look like?

The recipe would be divisible at the ingredient level–where the corollary could be tracks in a playlist. Each ingredient has an associated amount and state, like a track has length, bpm, artist, and album, at a minimum. These ingredients could then be built into playlists, or recipes, but also live in clouds of a folksonomy. This kind of organization could really allow for a community of learning, experimentation, and preparation optimization and customization.

Some of the sites worth checking out, if you’re in the recipe hacking state of mind:
CtrlAltChicken: Alex Albrecht of diggnation fame hosts a self-proclaimed geek cooking videocast
NPR: Food Hackers Make High-Tech Geek Cuisine
Wired: The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking
Cooking for Engineers
Microformats: Recipe Examples
khymos.org - molecular gastronomy and the science of cooking
My del.icio.us cooking tags.

*Funny enough, Betty is a persona, General Mills turning a persona inside-out way back when… not quite true to the Hacker ethic, yet…

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 8:54 pm and is filed under General, Web. It is further classified using the following tags cooking, Food, gastronomy, hacking, opensource, recipe, science, Web and web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.