Common Media, Inc.

If we seem to be a little quiet lately, it’s because we’ve been busy. Just over two weeks ago, we were chosen to work with the U.S. division of Quadratum Publishing to produce the website for the U.S. edition of their flagship magazine, La Cucina Italiana. The Italian edition has been published for nearly eighty years and is the most successful cooking magazine in Italy; in light of the growing U.S. market (something we’ve noted elsewhere) the U.S. edition is being re-tooled and re-launched with a star publishing team. And who else has better web experience in this area than Common Media?

With two issues of the new La Cucina Italiana already out and a third shipping any day now, the site we just launched an hour or so ago had to be ready as soon as we could push it out the door. In the coming weeks, we will be ramping up features to bring this site more in line with the Italian site, which has features, video tutorials, and a staggering recipe database. We’ll discuss these features more in the coming weeks, as we get closer to launching the next stage.

Meanwhile, back to the code!

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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

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Download this press release in PDF format.

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