Engineering food and drink experiences by and for geeks

The geeks are cooking now. Or will be after they read “Cooking for Engineers.” Done by a software developer, Michael Chu, in Silicon Valley. Mmmm, this makes me hungry!

Noah Kagan sent me this one (he’s a user experience designer, used to work for Facebook). We were talking last weekend about potential videoblogs that might be fun to do. His idea was to do a cooking show, which I thought was a great idea. Why would that work and why is that an opportunity that isn’t filled by mainstream media like Julia Childs? Because, let’s say I have an iPod. Let’s say I had 50 different recipes downloaded onto my iPod, but each one is a video podcast. First 10 seconds of each is a list of ingredients you need from the store. Now, no program on TV does that. Why? Cause that’s a lame format for something where you’ll watch for 30 or 60 minutes. But an iPod is different — you can select from a number of choices and you can carry the thing around with you. The needs of an iPod user are DIFFERENT than the needs of someone sitting on their Barcalounger watching a TV screen. Don’t ya think?

This opens up a whole raft of new content opportunities. Imagine if Robert Hess converted all his cocktails on his Drinkboy site to videos? (He’s a geek who works at Microsoft, by the way).

I wonder what a food critic, like Hillel Cooperman’s TastingMenu (a geek who runs the Microsoft Max team at Microsoft) would be able to do with video? That site rocks, by the way.

Do you have a favorite food or drink site? Especially ones done by geeks with day jobs like these?