BooRah - Inside the Buzz

The James Beard Foundation Awards recognize the most outstanding talent in food and beverage industry. As usual, New York city has quite a few nominations followed by other top cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

You can search BooRah for nominees and write a review to share your experiences at the restaurant.

• James Beard Nominees in New York City
• James Beard Nominees in San Francisco
• James Beard Nominees in Los Angeles
• James Beard Nominees in Chicago
• James Beard Nominees in Seattle

You can check the entire list and get additional details from the James Beard Foundation website.

I was walking by Castro street yesterday and came by this new place which is set to open soon. Looks like a great place, can’t wait to add to our list and try it out.

Diyar Bistro  & Wine Bar

Today, BooRah is launching a new program that can benefit charities such as Sankara Eye Foundation, Children’s Tumor Foundation and America’s Second Harvest Food Bank. We’re requesting passionate people to sign up as BooRah members, invite their friends and families to participate, and thereby help these deserving organizations. Being a small company with many financial constraints, this is an option that lets us spread the word about our company while contributing to a worthy cause.
In early 2000, I came across a couple of my Indian friends who were volunteers at a relatively unknown charitable organization called Sankara Eye Foundation. As I saw their passion and dedication to realize a dream of “20/20 by year 2020″ in India, I felt compelled to participate and contribute. Today, they perform about 70,000 free eye surgeries every year and continue to expand. While their donations continue to grow, it is the grass roots efforts of their members that have made the organization vibrant and a model for many.

Locally, we continue to struggle with overwhelming burden of sub-prime mortgage melt down, inflation and threats to national security. People are turning to food banks and soup kitchens for help with basic necessities. According to the March 20th Wall Street Journal, local food banks are struggling at a time when more and more people are having trouble making the ends meet. The federal government and a number of corporations such as Walmart are stepping in to help in a big way.

Each year, 1 in 3,000 children throughout the world are born with a genetic disorder called Neurofibromatosis (NF). NF causes tumors to grow anywhere on or in the body, and can lead to severe forms of brain tumors, learning disabilities, and deformities. There is no cure. The Children’s Tumor Foundation is dedicated to ending NF through research and to improving the health and well being of those affected by NF.

We at BooRah, want to make a difference, in our own small way!

Tell your friends to join BooRah today and sign up to contribute to one of the above charities. In exploring BooRah, we hope that you’ll also have a found a new destination on the Internet for you to pick a restaurant for your next dining occasion.

BooRah will contribute $.10 to the charity you select, for you and for every new BooRah member referred by you through BooRah’s “donate to charity” program between March 23 and April 30, 2008 - up to $1,000 in total contributions. We’ll make the contributions during the month of May 2008. You must use BooRah website for us to process your referrals correctly. You can sign up for “donate to charity” program at http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/signup/charity.html

Many foodie bloggers contribute invaluable content about restaurants for consumers to explore new tastes. If you happen to search for restaurants in Yahoo or Google, you are likely to come across CitySearch, or Yelp and sometimes, BooRah . However, blogs offer a wealth of information that one cannot glean off of review sites. By way of descriptive narratives and gorgeous pictures, they encourage you to try new dishes and discover new local favorites.. There are 1000’s of foodie bloggers across the country who dedicate their time and effort to bring out the “best restaurants” for the communities they live in/dine around. At BooRah, we thrive on featuring the best content across the Internet. Our mission is to help people make the best dining decisions as well as bring visibility to all reviewers including bloggers who contribute in modestly small numbers but make up a big chunk of the long tail of restaurant content on the Internet. So with the introduction of our new blog analysis platform(still in alpha) , here’s our initial top 100 restaurant blogger list.

E.g., take Anna Haight of mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com, who describes restaurants in a wonderfully pleasant way with great pictures of food that seem to make you hungry instantly. We have counted 91 different blog posts, 29 of which we could associate with restaurants in our database with many many pictures to see and explore. Imagine the richness of all this content at your disposal. Similarly ChristianZ and PleasurePalate create invaluable content for locations around Los Angeles that are otherwise starved for great content. One of such foodie blogs will help you find a dinner to delight the palate.

I’ve listed the top 25 blogs here:

1. mtkilimonjaro.blogspot.com - Anna Haight
2. ocmexfood.blogspot.com - ChristianZ
3. pleasurepalate.blogspot.com - pleasurepalate
4. foodandthings.blogspot.com - Food and Things
5. foodhoe.wordpress.com - foodhoe
6. kikimaraschino.blogspot.com - Kiki Maraschino
7. foodieuniverse.blogspot.com - Foodie Universe
8. what2order.blogspot.com - kewlio
9. elmomonster.blogspot.com - elmomonster
10. 52flavorsnyc.blogspot.com - Jen
11. bayfood.blogspot.com - Lucie
12. eateryrow.blogspot.com - Jon Parker
13. jobostonisafoodie.blogspot.com - Jo
14. sgcuizine.blogspot.com - Sharona
15. sisterswhoeat.blogspot.com - sister#2
16. dinerwood.blogspot.com - Mike “Pie is a Food not a Number” Tanner
17. wtle-new-york.blogspot.com - Admin
18. aki-eats.blogspot.com - aki
19. tastetests.blogspot.com - taste tester
20. foodmakesmehappy.blogspot.com - Cindy. Lo.
21. hiddennewyork.blogspot.com - Marc
22. chungfood.blogspot.com - David
23. finechina.wordpress.com - finechina
24. umamimart.blogspot.com - kayoko
25. wtle-miami.blogspot.com - Admin

Here’s a plain English explanation of our algorithm that is used to compute the rankings. We process over 100,000 blogs and identify which of those blogs have content related to restaurants. When we process an individual blog entry from a blogger, our semantic entity-mapper looks for information that can help us associate the blog post with one of the known restaurants in our database. In many cases an address or phone number or both will help but we can also associate through fuzzy, natural language entity mapping. To explain further, here’s a blog post about restaurant Kowloon in Saugus. Our semantic extraction identifies Kowloon as a restaurant and Saugus as a place and associates them together and looks for restaurants that match the criteria.

Once the association has happened, the ranking algorithm is a straight tally of all the reviewed restaurants by any blogger. Additional points are awarded to blogs with pictures (which is an indication of the quality of the content). We also extract boos & rahs from the content to identify the sentiment expressed by the author.

If there are bugs that any of you can identify with entity association or missing mappings - let us know and we’ll correct any bugs as soon as possible. Also, in future, if you could add additional restaurant details such as name, address and phone in the blog, it would be easy to associate your content with a restaurant and provide attribution and credit to your post.

Note: If your blog is missing in our database, let us know and we’ll investigate.

Forbes magazine ran a recent article on the top “power lunch” spots in the US. With links to their BooRah profiles, here they are:

- Michael’s, Manhattan (favorite of Ronald Perelman, Les Moonves signed Katie Couric there, Warren Buffet forged charity lunches idea there)

- The Palm, Morton’s, Charlie Palmer Steak and The Capital Grille in Washington, DC (steakhouses are favorites as “safe”, “macho” places among the politicos)

- Prime Blue Grille in Miami (real estate developer George Perez’s hangout)

- Craft in LA (due to its proximity to Creative Artists Agency)

- And of course there’s Denny’s in South San Francisco (where anonimity was preferred by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen meeting with Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt)

Where are your favorite power lunch places?

We launched features to manage restaurants recently and it’s interesting note that restaurants like to link back to their profile pages on boorah for engagement. It’s an interesting eco-system of deriving credibility from cross linked sites. Check one of our restaurant partners Opus italian Restaurant.

Stephanie Hobbs has a good post on Search Engine Land about local mobile search and how the yellow page organization are looking at the landscape to brace for new generation of smarter and powerful mobile devices.  According to the article, key attributes that need to be made easily accessible for  mobile applications are:

• Name, Address and Phone Number
• Maps and Driving Directions
• Hours and Contact Information
• Daily Specials and Coupons
• Opt-in Advertising

While these are critical elements, I believe consumers are going to expect information such as reviews, ratings, pictures and videos as well. Form factor and user interface continue to be issues, but the adoption of mobile applications including local search will be based to large extent on whether all the content can be seamlessly accessed on web browsers as well as mobile devices.

Newsweek’s  Tony Dokoupil has an interesting article  suggesting that era of wisdom of crowds is fast  becoming the past. We at BooRah, don’t think so!

Recently, I wrote an extensive article titled what beats Zagat?  that discusses Restaurant Ratings and Reviews on BooRah. It provides one explanation on how automated systems can leverage content created by the crowd and can perform much better against, so called experts. At the end of the day there is no right or wrong but there are two aspects to be looked at. 

1. Can the experts be better than a collective group, ie. wisdom of crowd?
2. Can the experts provide the level of coverage that a crowd can?

A case can be made that experts have been the single voice and thereby perceived as the authority for a long time. Many reviews for movies, restaurants and events were rated by experts and they could make or break the business through their influential commentary, even though many of us disagreed with the expert. What the Internet has done is democratized the influence process. If I can trust my friend Joe more than Michael Bauer, that’s my choice, but at least I have a choice. At the end of the day, that’s always a good thing.

As for coverage, no expert/system of experts can come close to contributions from getting the masses involved. The level of participation depends on the complexity and pervasive nature of subject in discussion. E.g, for restaurants or movies, the crowds can be a lot more effective than any one expert who can can only cover a small fraction of the domain.

For all those users, who’ve requested a simpler search option for boorah restaurants, we’ve just deployed a newer lightweight web functionality. E.g you can now search for restaurants on the phone with this new link http://www.boorah.com/restaurants/m

Check it out.

BooRah’s City landing pages bear a new look now. It combines of better visual design, user experience and navigational elements. We are pretty happy about and hope you’lll like it. For example, check out Restaurants in San Francisco.  The home page now gives you a quick view of all the possible options for you  to start your restaurant search. You can now find

• Top Rated Restaurants
• Search for Restaurants by best Cuisines in the city
• New Restaurants
• Restaurants with Discounts or Coupons
• Check out online menus and order takeouts

In addition, we’ve also started incorporating content from various blogs across the Internet that talk about restaurants in our coverage area. You can see the content under "Foodie Blogs" section. Blogs contribute very high quality content for various restaurants and we’d like to bring visibility to top blogs so consumers can easily access the rich content and benefit from it. Stay tuned as we will provide additional details in future posts.

Take a look at our new look and feel and let us know if you like it