Emeril's Site Has a Blog...and It's Pretty Good!
Tuesday, November 28, 2006 | posted by Mike
Regular readers of TVFF.com know that I occasionally like to give food celebrities a hard time about their websites, especially when they’re not regularly updated (Giada!) or they don’t really make use of reasonably new technology (Pretty much everyone else!). Well, I guess it’s only fair that I also point out when I see someone doing a nice job, so here we go…Emeril’s site has a blog…and it’s pretty good.
First of all, I should probably say that Emeril’s site as a whole is very well done. This is not surprising because, in addition to being the online presence of (no offense, Rachael) the biggest food celebrity around, it’s also a pretty nifty e-commerce site and home base for all of his restaurants. You can get everything from cutlery to spaghetti sauce on the site, so it pays (and I’m sure he paid) to have it look snazzy.
But the things that I stumbled upon recently are under the “RSS” link. First, there is an RSS feed for his “Newsroom,” which has the latest info on the chef and his restaurants. But the really cool thing is an RSS feed for the section of his site titled “Emeril’s Notes From the Kitchen.”
Updated pretty regularly by someone who goes by the name “lgaudin,” it covers all different kinds of food-related topics, from the always-popular turducken to the recently announced change to Hellmann’s mayonnaise. The posts are short but topical and, most importantly, the entries sound as if they’re written by a real person instead of some PR drone pumping out content. (No offense to PR drones.)
It’s not a complete home run…there is no way to leave comments and linking to individual posts is a bit of a hassle, but it’s still way out in front of much of what else is out there. They even have an extremely helpful explanation of how RSS works, which is fantastic for an audience that may not be as familiar with newer technology.
So, hats off to Emeril and, more importantly, to his web team.
Labels: Emeril Lagasse
