To Link or Not to Link? The saga continues...

A not so short story to illustrate how messy this whole attribution of recipes thing can get.You recall that shampoo commercial where a smiling model (with perfect hair) coos on camera about how she tried a particular product ? She talks about how she told two friends (here the screen shot of her smiling faces doubles)..."and they told two friends" (the screens quadruple)...her voice over continues "and so on...and so on..." as the television screen progressively fills with multiple shots of her smiling face with her impeccably styled blonde hair and the sound tracks multiply to reinforce the effect.Then there is that HBO feature, "The Buzz". Celebrities are interviewed about their upcoming shows, about what they are watching, all intended to build interest on the part of the general public in whatever HBO is up to. The graphic for the feature is another illustration of how word of mouth multiplies, spreading the buzz throughout, well, throughout the "hive".

Yup. The hive. That'd be you and me, fellow honey bee.Recipes are similar, the enthusiasm about them spreads just like the excitement generated around a new show or a great hair care product.

Good recipes spread by word of mouth, or now more likely by post of blog, as each person posts, another person reads that, tries it and posts it, then more people read it and try it and post it and so on...and so on....

Case in point. Today I received email notification of a new post to a favorite blog of mine, "Feelgood Eats" written by Sue Bette in which she recaps a recent Canned Tuna "Quest for the Best" challenge, and shares a great summer salad recipe featuring tuna and green beans.(photo credit:FeelGood Eats)

Feelgood Eats appeals to me not only because Sue Bette keeps an eye on the nutritional content and benefits offered by recipes, but she also demonstrates a consistent regard for the sustainability of the resources involved. She connects the dots for folks, showing the impact on the environment for eating certain foods or using certain products.

I share her concerns and deeply appreciate that she goes to the trouble to investigate and educate her blog readers as to why they should be concerned too. Feelgood Eats is all about whole, seasonal, and local foods. It is a great resource, accessibly written, and presents precisely the type of overview we need more of in food writing.

But back to the linking issue. I'd read the Canned Tuna Challenge and have some responsibly fished canned tuna already in my pantry. I was primed to make "tuna something".In today's post, Sue Bette presents a recipe that looks tempting to me but represents a combination my family wouldn't ordinarily go for. However, at the end of the post she has featured links to three additional recipes, one of which (Pasta with Tuna, Arugula and Hot Pepper) caught my eye immediately as a great prospect for dinner tonight.

So I point and click and voila! I am taken to another regularly visited and referenced blog, this one called "Simply Recipes" , featuring the writing of four different authors, including the originator Elise Bauer, who seems to be the writer behind the posts I am typically drawn to. (photo credit Elise Bauer Simply Recipes)I check out Elise's post about tuna and pasta (referenced by and linked to by Sue Bette's post) and the second sentence reads "I came across this recipe on Sher's What did you eat? blog, where she got it from the San Francisco Chronicle."

I went back just to check, and the SF Chronicle recipe was featured on March 7, 2007. Sher's post on it was written several days later. Elise posted on it this March 14th, about a year later, and I just stumbled across this daisy chain of links to the recipe today, nearly five months later.

I am sitting in Central Texas in August of 2008 getting ready to gather ingredients to prepare a recipe that was originally printed in a San Francisco newspaper in March of 2007.It will be a delicious dinner tonight, but it would never happen without people sharing the information, in this case via a series of linked blog posts.

Some would maintain that this increasingly typical manner of roundabout recipe sourcing potentially violates intellectual property boundaries, but I heartily disagree. I believe sharing is at least half the reason to formulate a recipe in the first place.

The original recipe in the SF Chronicle article as written by staff writer Janet Fletcher was printed specifically for people to use. Fletcher is the author of several books on food and wine, and her column has won several James Beard awards. I do not own her books and have not read them (yet) but feel secure the focus of her writing is to encourage people to eat and drink and enjoy doing so.

The recipe for pasta and arugula, along with several other really good preparations for greens (I encourage reading the whole article) was provided for folks to actually prepare the dishes and enjoy the meals, not just to read about it and forget. Further, the recipes allow readers not only to prepare the dish once and enjoy it, but to duplicate that experience on demand, and to share that freely.

The bottom line for me is this: a recipe holds and even gains value based upon it's utility to reliably produce an enjoyable dining experience. Aside from wonderful anecdotal surrounds several authors are known for, and the occasional line drawings or beautifully photographed food stylings included, published recipes exist to be put into practice, not admired as an art form.

As opposed to the recent dust up over that kitchen gang who seem to feel they can perfect a recipe so that it can only be used with credits and links by their permission and without any alterations or substitutions, most of the reliable sources for recipes are more than happy to have their recipes used, shared, and enjoyed.

Sure there are those exceptions, legendarily stingy local cooks who will share their recipes on request only to delete some key ingredient or technique note to insure that they and they alone are able to reproduce the results.

Is that you? I hope not. That's not me.

Enough is enough already. I propose we allow common sense and decency to prevail. Be honest, play nice, give credit where credit is due, but for heaven's sake when you come across a recipe that is great, don't keep it to yourself. Share it so others can benefit. Isn't that what writing about eating is good for?As the saying goes: Woes shared are halved. Joys shared are doubled. A good recipe is a joy. Share it!

The Weakest Link

Note: Occasionally worlds collide. I am posting this on two different blogs because the topic of blogging in general and the furor occasioned by activity in the food blogging world recently has this applying equally to both./TD

Do you remember that show on TV? The one where at some point somebody was ushered off to the scolding tones of the host "You are the weakest link. Goodbye!".

In the online world, there seemed to be no such thing as a weak link. In most blogger's minds, a link, representing as it does the potential to reach a new group of people who will view and share content and comments, is generally considered a boon.

I read blogs and log into websites representing large communities featuring articles, threads and posts routinely garnering dozens to hundreds of comments. As somebody who regularly checked (and rechecked) my posts for comments of any sort in vain, I was envious of the attention.

On some level I craved that exposure, that audience, those accolades. I wished for nothing more than to log in, check my blogs, and see a respectable double digit down there in the "comments" section. That, I thought, would be it, baby. The real sign that I had arrived.

Over the course of the past two weeks, two things have happened to shift my thinking.

Coming a bit late into the blogging game, I'd been doing some checking around to determine the proper etiquette for taking somebody's recipe, tweaking it, and then writing a post about it.

Recipes evolve. It is their very nature to do so. Each recipe represents an attempt to take available ingredients and transform them into a dish that will provide nutrition in a way that is pleasing to the palates of the intended audience. When availability of ingredients shifts, or when an intended eater's requirements vary, a recipe must be adjusted accordingly in order to survive as more than a historical or social anachronism.

As best I could see, common practice for food bloggers was to credit all recipe sources specifically, link to them if possible, and reprint the original recipe only if it represented what you were writing about preparing. As I understand it, if I am taking somebody else's recipe and changing it around for whatever reasons, I link to the original, credit the source, then reprint the recipe as I actually prepared it, noting any changes in amounts, substituted ingredients, or alterations in time required or technique.

As part of my research I stumbled across an online drama unfolding over the past couple of weeks that illustrated the perils of my assumptions. An individual food blogger posted a recipe containing modifications, credited and linked to the original recipe although doing so without directly granted permission. This original recipe came from a commercial source. The blogger was reportedly contacted by a publicist from the source of the original recipe who asked her to remove both the link and the modified recipe from her blog. The blogger questioned the need for such a move and a lively email exchange ensued which the blogger then posted.

This exchange between the commercial enterprise and the individual has been picked up by other bloggers who linked to her post and to each other (not unlike what I have done), and a perfect storm of comments grew, as folks debated copyright issues, intellectual property, propriety on the net, fair use, corporate blindness, and various other fascinating issues generated.

I am not here to enter the debate. Consensus seems to be that a recipe cannot be copyrighted or patented. Actual recipes, lists of ingredients with the basic instructions on steps to prepare or combine, are not considered exclusive domain. A particular way of describing how to prepare a dish, including a style of commentary or a very instructive or radical departure in form or order in steps, or in adding ingredients, should be considered exclusive and thereby is (theoretically) protected. Along similar lines, a particular technique or process can be patented.

I think the discussion threads themselves are mostly healthy examinations of how to properly use such a public form of discourse and how to properly credit sources.The rest of the hooraw seems to center around whether or not this blogger crossed a line in reprinting her email exchange with the company representative, balanced by considerations of whether or not she was treated fairly by the commercial enterprise. The question is raised, is it a good idea for a commercial enterprise to respond in such Big Brother fashion at the risk of alienating scores of the their targeted market?

In this case there is a lot of attention that has been generated for both the blogger and the commercial kitchen. There are, not surprisingly, nearly as many opinions on the various questions raised as there are folks commenting on the situation. In the fuss however, the recipe itself, a basic potato salad, has gotten completely lost in the shuffle. So when does a lot of attention become too much? At some point does a comment thread overshadow and render irrelevant the post it relates to?

The other item that has me rethinking the desirability of attention and comments is this article from the NY Times Magazine.

Sidebar: Although themselves a commercial enterprise, the New York Times displays permalinks for their articles with this explicitly printed understanding, "To link to this article from your blog, copy and paste the url below into your blog or homepage. Using this link will ensure access to the article, even after it becomes part of the NYT archive." Granted, they generate income from advertisers apart from subscribers, but their granting permalinks for articles represents a shift for them, coming after a trial of both reserved content for subscribers held aside from freely accessed online material, and altering a previous policy of charging for article access from archives past a certain time span.

I admit to residual naivéte about the internet and all the consequences of having personal content distributed and existing independently for all eternity, searchable, and available to anybody with an internet connection. I' will also admit to previously expressing amusement over how some recent college graduates were chagrined to find their employment prospects dimmed by the unfiltered material they had posted on their social networking sites.

I read with significantly less amusement the August 3, 2008 article in the NY Times Magazine by Mattathias Schwartz that takes a closer look at the world of online trolls. Another feature in the Times asking for comments on the article took on a life of its own as well, eventually veering from responses to the topic of the article itself to commenting on the comments, and finally speculating whether or not the article's author had himself been "trolled". In a bit of holding up the mirror to admire its impact, the Times also runs a feature listing blogs posting to their articles.(image credit:Country Shrink.Com)

So far the "Malwebolance:The Trolls Among Us" article itself has reflected a lot of attention back to the Times. If it is attention they wanted with this article, so far so good although there are a host of seasoned voices questioning the wisdom of shining any additional attention on the trolling community who seem to crave precisely that - at any cost.

With internet access so common, with online threads such a regular feature of our daily lives, they are most certainly subject to the same caveats as with any other endeavor. You are looking for attention? Be very careful what you wish for.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.