Thermal refreshening of a bread product
By far, the weirdest thing ever about a blog is being able to see what my previous pictures used to be like. Most of what I write is just so atrocious that a tiny bit of upchuck warms the back of my throat whenever I have to read my own ‘writing’. Pictures are more ‘in your face’ and requires very little time to analyze. This English muffin picture was uploaded May of 2008. Jeebus. Three years ago! Why am I talking about toasted English muffins? Because today the topic is toast and Nathan Myhrvold. If you don’t know who Nathan Myhrvold is, then you probably was asleep when he was promoting his 6 volume, 2400 page tomb called Modernist Cuisine. The guy used to be CTO at Microsoft. Smart dude. Now he works at Intellectual Ventures, which produced the book. See I thought this Myhrvold guy was cool, and lending his smarts to cooking and helping everyone out. Over at This American Life, there is a story about patents, and it doesn’t necessarily paint Myhrvold as completely nice. Intellectual Ventures is known to hold many patents, and is known to defend their patents. How does this apply to food though?
If you’re wondering why in this poor economy, sometimes we don’t see the innovation that we ought to see, take a listen to the TAL podcast. It’s an in-depth look into the patent scene as applied to the tech industry. They also talk about patent number 6080436, “Bread Refreshing Method.” If you wanted to make a restaurant called Toast, Bitches! you might have to pay some asshole royalties! For doing toast! Toast!? How can there be a patent on toasting bread? It’s ludicrous. But companies that own patents like Apple, Samsung, Google, IV, Microsoft, and many others consistently sue each other based on patents. Just go read Engadget on a daily basis and basically they just keep suing each other back and forth. Seriously, could a restaurant that features toast be sued? Maybe Eddie Huang’s April Fool’s joke about a toast restaurant would never fly since it would get sued.
All this leads me to my next idea… yea I’m full of ideas and not on execution. How about I start adding lists to Food in Mouth? Like Top 10 places to get Toast or Top 10 Best Places to get Hamburger in NYC (just so I hit all my keywords in one phrase, the way SE does). Apparently lists are all the rage. It’s on dinevore, foursquare, foodspotting, and I guess SE, although they hide their lists in a slideshow and it’s not feature they tout. There’s a difference between editorialized lists like SE’s, versus user generated ones like on the other three sites. I find user-generated lists to be not super useful, unless that user is super well-known. For example, Adam Kuban’s list on foursquare is especially useful. But random person’s list? Who knows? So I can go ahead and just make like Top 10 lists of pizzas, ice creams, hamburgers, Chinese food, etc. Do y’all think that wouuld be useful? What if I just flat out copy other people’s lists and put it on my website for page views? I have an idea to let users be able to vote on the lists too (which would make Food in Mouth lists completely original), but that’s more complex and would be step two in case the lists are actually useful. So what say ye, listicles or no lists?
Posted by Danny on August 16, 2011 at 4:09 pm
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