Common Media, Inc.

We’ve not been doing very well at reporting our activities here, even though things have been happening which are worth reporting. Forthwith, an update.

La Cucina Italiana occupied a significant chunk of our March. Phase Two of that project, which will see the beginnings of that venerable publication’s massive recipe database becoming available on the site, is complete and is only awaiting editorial oversight of the recipes being entered in the database. Phase Three is under discussion, and is the most exciting part from our point of view, as it will allow the site’s readers to engage the brand directly on the site through comments, ratings, and discussion.

We’re drawing closer to the public launch of an interesting project we started last fall with Scott Soloway. We’ll tell you more about this site when it launches, but for the moment we’ll say that it’s a web service of a sort we’d never handled before, and it includes a strong machine-learning component, which we loved.

We learned just a day or two ago that we’ll be building a new iteration of the website for the Track and Field Writers of America (TAFWA), a professional organization Parker has actually belonged to since his days at Runner’s World. Like many professional organizations, TAFWA has a specific audience to address and clear goals and constraints for their site, but their skills tend not to lie in web development or HTML coding. Our goals for this site are to create a site which is easy for non-technical users to maintain but which will help TAFWA itself provide useful services for its members.

With all this contract work going on, you’d worry that our own projects are being neglected. To the contrary, both “common” sites have seen development activity in recent weeks, though not necessarily in visible ways. My post earlier this week sprung from work I’m doing implementing a machine-learning based shoe recommendation system for Common Running, for example, and we’re gearing up to refresh the shoe database with the latest models.

Common Kitchen got a typical update earlier this afternoon, in which we updated the process for adding cookbooks and magazines to the site. This involved ripping out a chunk of code and replacing it with the neater, tighter acts_as_amazon_product code from Netphase. Their code searches books only by default, so we tweaked the plugin a bit ourselves to handle magazines and other product types using an optional parameter. The difference is pretty slight from the user’s end, but it’s typical of the work we’re doing on Common Kitchen nowadays, where we trim, tighten and otherwise refactor the site’s code based on what we’ve learned since we started.

There’s more CMI work waiting in the wings, both some potential outside projects and some ideas we’re brewing for our own sites. We’ll try to keep you posted here!

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CommonKitchen.com offers food lovers a single site to organize their recipes, cookbooks, favorite food blogs, and local restaurants while sharing them with other users.

Medford, Massachusetts, November 20, 2007 — Common Media, Inc. today announced the launch of its first single-interest community website, CommonKitchen.com. Common Kitchen allows food lovers to organize recipes in their virtual recipe box, search local restaurants in their area by menu item, tag, and user review, as well as discover new recipes, cookbooks, and food blogs through the suggestions of other members.

“There are lots of recipe-sharing websites on the Internet,” said Common Media co-founder Noah W. Smith. “Each of them has different strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all walled gardens; they don’t allow easy access to recipes located elsewhere on the Web.”

CommonKitchen.com allows its community members to bookmark recipes located on any website, from the biggest recipe-sharing sites to niche sites with only two or three posted recipes. It also allows visitors to track and review printed recipes found in magazines and cookbooks.

By allowing the bookmarking of recipes posted on food blogs, as well as offering users the chance to host their own food blog on the site, Common Kitchen hopes to reward the efforts of thousands of food bloggers around the Internet. “These bloggers collectively post as many recipes as many of the larger food sites, and we are making it easier for that work to be discovered,” said Smith.

CommonKitchen.com also offers its users the chance to search and review local restaurants. Unlike most restaurant-review sites, Common Kitchen allows users to rate individual dishes on the menu, enabling a search-by-dish feature unique to the site. “This allows our community members to direct each other to the places where their favorite dishes are done best,” explains Smith. “If a restaurant which would otherwise be rated poorly has some standout items on its menu, those should be allowed to shine.”

“We hope CommonKitchen.com can be a true community of users sharing what they love about food,” said Smith.

For more information on Common Kitchen, contact Parker Morse or visit www.commonkitchen.com.

About Common Media, Inc.:

Common Media, Inc. is a Massachusetts company dedicated to building useful single-interest community websites. The company was founded in May 2007 by two recent graduates from Tufts University’s Graduate School of Engineering; they have 20 years of web production experience between them.

Contact:

Parker Morse
Common Media, Inc.
413-695-3573
http://www.commonmediainc.com

###

Download this press release in PDF format.

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Before I explain the quotation marks, an announcement: there’s actually something at our website now. The beginnings of the restaurant functions are online, and available for our users to kick around. If you already have a login from our feedback application, that works for the new site.

If you don’t have a login, you can still click around some, but to really get involved (for example, to post reviews or link your friends) you’ll want to register. Right now, we’re manually approving registrations to control access to the site, but you should get an activation email within a few hours.

Now, why I put quotes around the “beta” in the title. It’s not too hard to click some “Web 2.0″ sites and find that silly little word floating around the logo somewhere—Gmail, actually, is still “beta” according to their logo, although there are probably a million plus people using it as their primary email reader. Some web developers put a “beta” badge on their site like a reflex, without thinking about it; it’s just a design element to them.

“Beta,” when the term was originally used in this context, meant, “this is likely to break somewhere.” It meant, “We don’t claim this work is ready for wide consumption.” Beta software was usually limited to a controlled pool of testers outside the development team. (Alpha software went to an even smaller pool of testers, almost always insiders, who were willing to watch it crash often.) The whole point of putting software through a “beta” phase was to find problems, so they could be fixed.”

“Web 2.0″, mostly following Google’s lead, made something of a joke of those old conventions. Web apps have spent years in “beta” (e.g. Gmail) and Flickr even rolled itself into a “Gamma” stage, presumably tongue-in-cheek.

Maybe I’m just an old web curmudgeon, but this isn’t what I have in mind when I say “Beta.” This new use of the “beta” label is just like the old “Under Construction” graphics that used to litter sites in the mid-1990s. Those graphics became a sign of the times as soon as people figured out that websites are almost always under construction; if they’re not seeing at least regular revision, they’re probably past their shelf life. So I’ve taught myself to see a “Beta” label as being a bit declassé: everyone knows that websites are always under development.

So I’ve been resisting putting “Beta” on the site. If we do put on such a label (we might,) I’ll be lobbying to remove it as soon as possible.

Right now, though, we are very much in a stage where the site is changing rapidly. We appreciate you checking it out and letting us know what you think, both positive and negative. At this stage, we’re mucking with the code on an hourly basis, so although it’s clear where we’re going now, what you tell us really does steer the way the site grows.

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Since our first day last week, we’ve performed a dress rehearsal software development cycle. We generated and “released” a small application to help Audrey with market research, and in doing that, Noah and I got some practice in our own process.

• This was my first experience actively developing the same code base with another person, and I am now a convert to the church of source code management (SCM). I don’t yet have strong opinions about things like Subversion versus CVS (or the cults of darcs and git) but having a system at all (it happens we’re using Subversion) was downright revelatory. What’s more, the combination of an online SCM repository and IM meant Noah and I could work at home almost as effectively as in the same place. (Where “the same place” is usually my apartment, but never mind.)

• Although we’ve been using Basecamp for large-scale project management, as we got close to “done”� yesterday I set up a Trac project on the development server. All three of us spent a few hours in a three-way Skype chat, clicking around in the application, trying to break it however we could. Whenever we found an inelegant error message, unexpected behavior, or just something that didn’t feel the way we thought it should, we opened up a ticket in Trac. After a while, Noah and I were swatting bugs and closing tickets almost as fast as we opened them, though with three people opening tickets and only two closing them we were bound to get behind. By the end of the evening, we were about four tickets from “good enough.”

• I’m growing quite fond of the fourth member of our team. It’s a Mac Mini hiding unobtrusively behind a framed photo in my living room. This spring I installed all the software we’d need to use it as a development server, then unplugged the keyboard, monitor and mouse and let it run headless. Yesterday it was the nerve center of the finishing rush, supporting both the code repository (I count 27 commits over a four-hour span) and Trac (I’m not going to guess at our peak ticket rate) as well as the test copy of the application itself. It still has some minor issues, but right now it’s our only tangible asset, and yesterday it was well worth the $600 or so we paid for it.

We’ll take a day to clean up some loose ends and maybe close a few more tickets on this project, then roll into “real”� coding later in the week.

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Someone asked me, a few weeks ago, what we’re up to with Common Kitchen. We’ve been talking to people about this for several months now, but we’ve also been finishing up graduate school, so Common Kitchen work has largely taken the form of procrastination from things like grading papers. (Given a choice between grading thirty-six written assignments on lambda calculus and configuring a development server, I will pick the server every time.)

I answered, with a straight face, “We’re trying to find our backside with both hands.”

I didn’t mean, of course, that we don’t know what we’re doing. We managed to convince the judges of the Tufts Business Plan contest that we were worthy of a finalist spot, after all, and Noah and I have put enough pages on the web that we’re familiar with that process. In general, however, I’ve done so in the context of a steady job. Building a website while also attempting to invent a company out of thin air significantly raises the degree of difficulty. The “to-do” lists coil in on themselves like fractal designs, and they involve things, like talking to lawyers, which are not taught in software engineering classes.

It’s terrifying, but it’s also exciting. And it’s that combination which has me up at 1 AM, the night after our “official” first full day of work, writing a blog post, because I can’t sleep.

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