Since January 1st, I’ve photographed and cataloged every meal I’ve eaten on a site called What I Ate This Year. I’ve been using Tumblr for the project, but thanks to an article on PSFK I discovered a photoblogging service called Eat.ly designed specifically for people to share their meals.
I gave the service a solid once-over but have decided to stick with Tumblr. While I’m on the topic, though, I figured I could share a little about my thought process and give some suggestions to Eat.ly for future growth.
The basic concept of Eat.ly is very simple: photograph and tag meals, follow friends who do the same, and everyone has the option to rate your meals on a scale of how healthy or unhealthy the meal looks. Eat.ly is, in its own words, “encouraging healthier and more social eating.” This is a lofty and admirable goal, and eat.ly does manage to attract more social eating.
Eat.ly’s main goal of healthy eating is what could limit its appeal. I think that forcing users to rate food items on a scale of unhealthy to healthy could breed a sort of uni-dimensional user base where the only people who visit the site are health junkies. As the site works right now, people who play by the rules should rate a photograph of a delicious but calorie-ridden meal as an unhealthy meal. That’s fair, but what if this meal is one of the best meals I’ve had in recent memory? Shouldn’t I be rewarded for having a good meal, not punished?
An aside: Tumblr’s functionality isn’t much better – you can either “like” a post or ignore it (just like Facebook, there is no “unlike” feature). But Tumblr is much more of an open canvas platform.
I would encourage Eat.ly to adopt either a 5 star rating scale or a Like-Unlike scale. Both of these are easily understood and can translate well to members of different communities. If I’m a (mostly) vegetarian, my friends can ‘unlike’ my photos when I give in to pressure and order the steak and ‘like’ when I show a healthy meal of grains and veggies. If I’m a foodie, my friends can ‘unlike’ boring shots of ham sandwiches and ‘like’ shots of something adventurous at the ethnic restaurant down the street. With a rating system that is not limited to unhealthy/healthy, Eat.ly lets users define their own limits. It says to them: “You and your friends are unique. You have your own methods of eating, and they may be different than other users on the site.” Eat.ly should facilitate the open rating of meals by friends, it should not judge users based on the perceived health quality of their meal.
A week and a half ago, the NFL made the mistake of creating a standardized logo for the Super Bowl. This ends the tradition and excitement of creating a new identity for each year’s game. From now on, each Super Bowl will use the same logo, slightly tweaking it each year for the correct Roman Numerals and host city.
I understand perfectly well the NFL’s reasoning behind this decision. First off, creating a new logo each year is hard work. More importantly, the league wants to gain some consistently over their image and this can and will certainly help. The league’s 2007 tweaking of its own logo is another example of this.
But the NFL is going about their visual identity in the wrong way. They are thinking about the Super Bowl in the same way someone thinks about the Rose Bowl, or the Orange Bowl, or any other college game, where the logo stays the same each year (pending ridiculous changes by sponsors of course). This is the wrong way to think about the Super Bowl. The NFL’s point of reference should not be college bowl games: it should be the Olympics or the World Cup.
The Super Bowl is the only championship game in the Big Four American sports that plays its game at a neutral ground. Thus each year, hypothetically at least, the Super Bowl is meant to display some sort of local flavor. At the very least, these logos give us something to look back on: I love checking out old Olympic logos, and I’m sure that with time we will all learn to love the London 2012 logo.
I wish the NFL did this differently. Sure, some of the logos lacked consistency. But now we are stuck with a lackluster logo that instantly dates the Super Bowl to the mid-noughties obsessed with chrome era. Instead, I believe the NFL should commission a new logo each year and get the work done by a shop located in the host city. How’s that for local flare?
For the past month and a half, I’ve photographed every meal I’ve eaten and cataloged them on a blog called What I Ate This Year. I recently hit the 100 post landmark and wanted to share some thoughts about the project.
I can describe WIATY in a few ways. In the simplest way it is a record of every meal that I eat for the entirety of 2010, tagged by content (type of meat, location, whether the meal was from a restaurant or home made). I designed WIATY in this style on purpose: I hope to glean some useful data from looking back at what I’ve eaten throughout the year. If this technology exists, I would love to sync up my Tumblr posts with my Last.fm history or with the weather, to observe if and how my food tastes are mirrored with my music choices or in the changing of the seasons.
I aim to prepare four quarterly reports from my stats, shamelessly inspired by Nicholas Felton and his Annual Reports. In these graphs I can present how frequently I eat fast food (too much, from the looks of things), and where and when I eat my favorite meals.
From the a social media perspective, WIATY is also an exercise in how much information about myself I am willing to share and am willing to analyze. I chose to only photograph and catalog meals – taking a photo of every snack I eat would be tiresome to say the least. I also believe that updating the site 2-3 times every day is much better for subscribers than sending off an update every time I eat an apple. Clearly my goal from WIATY is to analyze data. If my goal was strictly to eat healthier meals or cook more for myself, I would find it necessary to include everything I eat for the year. But the real thrill in this for me will be to pour over my data in the months to come and to see what I can discover.
Public transportation has a dirty name in America. So how do you make using the bus and the subway seem cool, especially in an image conscious city like Los Angeles?
In what appears to be a first for a transit system in the United States, LA’s Metro is now advertising its services as if it were a for-profit company. The embedded video tells the tale, but Metro has seen lots of success with this strategy. “Discretionary riders, those people who have the choice to commute by car or transit, have jumped from [a] 24 to 36 percent” share of total ridership.
So what’s behind LA’s strategy? First, the team consolidated the Metro into one cohesive brand. At one time, the video states, there were over 300 (!) logos in use by Metro. The company also simplified the colors of its buses to just two – orange and blue – to help riders associate the colors with the brand. The city brought in local artists to paint a number of subway stations, a two-fer that helps Metro’s image in the community and makes the physical stations better places to spend time in. As for traditional advertising, the Los Angeles Metro relied heavily on comparative ads that show the Metro as a hero and traveling by car as a villain. In one of my favorite touches of the campaign, baristas at local coffee shops wear Metro t-shirts with the hero/villain theme.
I applaud the Los Angeles Metro for this awesome campaign and for their increase in ridership. There are a few recommendations I’d like to make, though. The agency has a twitter account at @metrolosangeles, but with only 1,000 followers it doesn’t seem too popular. This is a great way for the agency to communicate with some of their riders and to share information about routes, service outages, etc. However there’s only so far you can go with the twitter/barista crowd. I recommend Metro to continue with community outreach programs like its art in the subway series. What about sponsoring performances of musicians in the stations? Or providing some sort of incentive program to the discretionary rider who constantly wrestles in between choosing the car or choosing the metro?
PSFK tipped me off to Seppukoo.com, a social experiment of sorts where you gain points for disabling your facebook account (committing “virtual suicide”) and then encouraging your friends to do the same. I love the idea and I think it speaks to a lot of the issues and anxieties that people today have with social media.
Facebook, Twitter, et al are now such an integral part of our lives that we sometimes forget what life was like before their existence. We forget how productive we can be without these distractions. Most importantly, we seek true connection and friendship even though we are paradoxically surrounded by virtual friends all day long. Seppukoo.com calls itself a “liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction” so users can “rediscover the importance” of being themselves. Perhaps most telling, Seppukoo.com does not permanently delete your Facebook account. This begs the question: Once you’ve joined Facebook, or Twitter, or any number of similar sites, can you ever actually stop using them?
A week and a half ago, the NFL made the mistake of creating a standardized logo for the Super Bowl. This ends the tradition and excitement of creating a new identity for each year’s game. From now on, each Super Bowl will use the same logo, slightly tweaking it each year for the correct Roman Numerals and host city.
