Are online user reviews better when they are written in the heat of the moment or after the writer has returned to the home computer and had some time to cool off? That is the question facing review sites like Yelp and Citysearch when they build mobile applications.
This post just went up on the New York Times Diner’s Journal blog about the ethics of food blogging. In it, Kim Severson asks “Should a food blogger follow the same ethics as a traditional food journalist?”
I have so much to say on this topic I should probably muzzle myself to keep from making this an all-out rant. I will say that it must be difficult for non-professionals to navigate what’s ethical and what’s not when many traditional food journalists push the ethical boundaries (media dinners, freebies etc.). But disclosure is key, and I applaud any effort to give guidance on that front.
Let’s hear it for that rarest of psychiatric disorders, folie à plusieurs, “the madness of many,” whereby large groups of people develop a shared delusion.
You remember how thousands drove to Conyers once a month to see the Virgin Mary screw with astronomical phenomena and channel messages to a woman living there. That was arguably a case of folie à plusieurs, even though nobody really deserved classification as loony-toons. (Of course, religion always exempts itself from characterization as crazy, even when its statues are bleeding grape jelly.)
I’m sorry, but I feel some of the same is going on with Varasano’s, the new pizzeria in Buckhead, whose opening — 10 years in the making, according to our server Sunday night — has caused more buzz than any restaurant in memory. Last week’s opening was even announced in the New York Times.
There’s a very simple explanation for all of this: Owner Jeff Varasano (whose passion for pizza I certainly do not question) has been hosting foodies at his home, where he has long experimented with making the perfect pizza.
