Foodily, the New Online Hub for Foodies

Ever noticed how the Google results for recipe searches are dominated by the big boys like AllRecipes, Epicurious, and the Food Network? The well-written and beautifully shot recipes posted by bloggers get buried below these behemoths with their huge page rank. But thanks to the launch of Foodily.com, there's a new way to search for recipes on the web that will help showcase the original work of food bloggers while giving readers a great tool to inspire their cooking.

I'm such a believer in the mission of the Foodily website that I signed on as one their ambassadors. The Foodily Beta launched earlier this month and was quickly hailed as the Facebook of Food. The site is populated with over one hundred thousand recipes, including 50 from yours truly. It is continually adding to its database by crawling web posts for hrecipe tags (HTML code that points to recipes). Foodily search is flexible and easy to use, easily letting you specify ingredients to include or exclude, as well as dietary restrictions such as gluten-free. So if you're looking for a gluten-free peach pie dessert but are allergic to almonds, you don't need to waste your time drooling over the wrong recipe.

I also love how Foodily has incorporated Facebook, so that you can see what recipes your friends have liked. It's like having a virtual cooking club, making the world wide web a little more personal. If you're having some friends for dinner and you're using Foodily for inspiration, you can even share your chosen menu with your guests on Facebook as part of your news feed or by creating a Facebook event.

But don't just take my word for it. Head on over to Foodily to take a look around. I can't wait to see what you like! Even the Foodily tagline is adorable:

What I Learned at the Yahoo Motherboard Summit

Last week I had the honor of being invited to the Yahoo Motherboard Summit. Yahoo flew out 70 social media moms to the Yahoo headquarters in Silicon Valley and gave us some serious pampering at the Palo Alto Four Seasons followed by a fascinating day meeting with many of the teams that make Yahoo! such a force online. The Yahoo! team was incredible, literally rolling out the purple carpet for us, and were genuinely interested in hearing what we had to say.

I've been a member of the Yahoo Motherboard since February and have been thrilled to interact with the group of intelligent moms Yahoo has recruited. We have monthly Twitter parties to discuss parenting topics such as being green, children and sports, and raising readers to name a few. There are no prizes, no jockeying for exposure to brands: just dialogue between moms on parenting. We also have the option to post to our blogs about the topic of the month to continue the discussion that way. It's a great group and I was thrilled to have the chance to spend some time offline with these women who have inspired me so much online.

The sessions were informative and thought-provoking. Many tears were shed during a presentation about Internet Safety where we heard about a local teen who committed suicide after a naked picture of her was circulated among her school. Seeing a police officer up on the stage was a chilling reminder of the danger of our technology toys. My 6 and 8 year old received iPod Nanos for Christmas with videos inside and immediately began recording footage to upload to YouTube. Technology is so pervasive in their lives; it's never too early to start educating our children on the power and potential danger of technology. And the danger is no longer from strangers; it's from peers. We need to teach our kids that they can be heroes simply by pressing the delete key.

Many of the other sessions provided valuable information for creating online content. My greatest takeaways were:

• Be concise and powerful when crafting blog post titles. Search engines only consider the first 65 characters of titles.
• Research shows that readers rarely read more than 300 words per web page. Don't wait til the end of your post to make your point. Use bullets and bold to keep readers engaged.
• Verbs are a powerful way to make your post stand out and keep your writing fresh.
• Labelling pictures is more important than you think. Not only does it help you with SEO - it's also what blind web surfers will hear.
• Before crafting a post, select your title and one keyword by doing a search on your topic to make sure it is popular but not too popular.
• We saw Heatmap research that tracked websurfers' eye. It confirmed that users read the top left of web pages the most - cluster what you want your readers to see there.

A huge thanks to the Yahoo Motherboard team for this great event - I'm still dreaming of the Four Seasons bed and digesting all that we learned and heard about.