A warm Happy New Year to all my fellow eaters of food.
If you’re anything like me, you treat the holiday season as an excuse to relax the rules and stuff your face with anything that looks good. At our house that meant the usual turkey, gravy and mashed potatoes, but also an unusual tummy-full of chocolate, cookies and other sweet treats. (A bit of advice: if you make a ton of Christmas cookies to give to friends, don’t forget to actually give most of them away. Otherwise, they’ll end up as a kind of diabetic science experiment roiling around in your gut.)
A winter fog rolls into Ruckle Farm, Salt Spring Island
Despite the Xmas feasting, it’s a barren time of year for locavore foodies, isn’t it? Well, not if you live in Australia, I suppose, but here in B.C. it’s all imported produce and questionably stored apples. Plus the inevitable leaf of kale–yuck. (Forgive me–I know it’s a sin not to promote kale.) Oh well. Try not to think about it, and get the deer fence built for the garden this spring.
Conscious Cook is going to shift direction in 2010. Last year was one big learning exercise in blogging and social media for me. It’s time to apply some of those lessons. The new approach will be:
More personal.
As much as I love the idea of “citizen journalism,” if that’s what you can call some of the more research-intensive posts I’ve done, it’s every bit as time-consuming as you’d expect. I hope it wasn’t a waste of time. It probably was. I’ll never know. I wanted to be purely objective. I didn’t mix business with blogging. I sold and promoted nothing. It was all fascinating and fun, and I wish we citizen-consumers could participate in this sort of thing more often. As for me, I’ve achieved my goal and I’m going to be horribly busy this year, so from now on I’ll stick to more of the short, personal posts that are the bread and butter of the blogger for pleasure.
Less Twitter intensive.
Maybe I’m alone in this feeling, but I feel that the trend arc of Twitter seems to have worked itself out. A year ago, hardly anyone had heard of it. Then the whole thing went batshit crazy for a while. 2009 was the Year of Twitter and during that whole epoch it was a subject of intense debate. What does it mean? Where will it go? How should you use it?
The answer is that there are many, many different ways to use it. I wish I had time to write about all the weird and wonderful variations on tweets and twitterers I’ve seen in the past year. For some, tweeting like maniacs a hundred times a day seems to offer substantial advantages. Others do little more than auto-alert new material on their sites, as though Twitter were nothing more than an RSS feed 2.0.
One thing you learn quickly is that there’s a heck of a lot more twittering going on than an actual reading of tweets. Many “followers” never actually see your tweets, either because they weren’t on when it flashed by, or because they’ve just given you a courtesy follow while filtering you out with a power app like Tweetdeck. (If you want to know how many people are really following someone, take their follower count and divide it by a number somewhere between ten and twenty-five.)
I learned a lot this year, not just about Twitter, but social media in general. Going forward, I know that I must either a) take a lot of time to continue thoroughly curating food news; or b) adopt the much more low-key approach of Twitter as blog support. Thankfully, there are zillions of professional food tweeps, now handily collected in lists, that will make option “A” easy for me to walk away from. I’m going to take what I learned and start tweeting for business, but that’s another story and another Twitter account…
That’s all for now. Toodleedoo, as Pete the Green Grocer, used to say. If you have any suggestions for inspirational winter food, I’d love to hear ‘em.
