My Special Person on the W.W.W.

As I was following my routine of cruising on the web, I decided to research food recipes on de.li.cious, just to see what is out there in the internet world. For those of you who have never heard of de.li.cious, this is a social bookmarking site that allows anyone to store their bookmarks on the web, so anyone can conveniently bring their bookmarks anywhere! People can tag these bookmarks and anyone with the right search words can look for these sites. Very resourceful indeed.

If you think about it, looking for the right tagger on these bookmarking sites is like searching for a soul mate. The perfect tagger would be someone who has similar ways of thinking and practices and the same interests. But it’s really hard nowadays to find someone like that. Nobody really likes “romantic strolls down the beach under a moonlit night,” let alone someone who wants to break out from their “food-eating” bubble and explore bizarre, unconventional recipes.

Yet, when you are intensely looking for something, you can never find it, but the moment you stopped looking, or even cared to think about it, the thing you are looking for appears. That is exactly what happened. With no intentions of finding that special person on the virtual planet, I searched for tags like “Cantonese cuisine” and “Canto recipes,” hoping to get lucky and run into an informative site of unordinary good Cantonese foods. After clicking on a link to a site, which brings me to a list of the people who tag the site, and clicking on another link that brings me to sites they have tagged, then searching through the taggers that tagged a particular site on that person’s list of sites, I found Mimmie29. She/he is my social bookmarking soul mate.

Mimmie29 is the walking library I have been looking for. She/he is an adventure-loving individual who loves to @try different foods and a person with well-rounded interests like games, technology, animal, and beauty as evident in her/his diverse tag cloud. 

You know the three little bears story of having porridge that’s just right? Well, the amount of bookmarks Mimmie29 has is just right: not too much to overcrowd the uniqueness of each bookmark and not too little to appear impassive about the topics. With a total of 1251 bookmarks, 117 are bookmarked on the topic of Chinese cuisine!

There really is no bookmarking pattern for Mimmie29. Although she/he bookmarks fairly frequently, some months she bookmarks less and sometimes more. But for sure, the M-ster marks a lot of pages on food, especially Chinese recipes. Mimmie29 even bookmarks videos on cooking!

I am especially impressed with the passion she puts into her bookmarks. Although she/he could have bookmarked only once for some sites, Mimmie29 likes to bookmark individual recipes she likes from the same sites. Not something I really do, but it tells me a lot about the particular recipes she/he likes…which so far, are also foods that I love!

As for tagging these resourceful pages, Mimmie29 does not clutter each bookmark with many tags: only a few to let you get an idea of what the bookmark's about. I must add that she/he took the time to put tags on each of her/his bookmark! Because no comments are given to the bookmarks, it does not give other bookmark-explorers biased opinions. On top of that, M-ster has great organization. She/he tends to group websites with broader tags, only putting more specific tags if the website, for example, links to a particular recipe like Three Cups Chicken.

From Mimmie29’s list of bookmarks, I found some interesting sites that I can use for my research on Cantonese food and culture. These sites are great because they are always a little more than just websites and blogs on Chinese cuisine, there is always a little twist to them. Like The Asian Grandmother’s Cookbook, which has a bigger mission than just spreading recipes:

a compilation of family and homecooking recipes from across the Asian smorgasbord, the idea being that grandmothers are the closest link we have to our cultures and traditions. It’ll also contain anecdotes and stories about family, food traditions, grandmothers, mothers and aunts. I envision it as a way to preserve traditional recipes for future generations.

Appetite for China is another interesting website on Chinese good eats. The author of this blog comes from a diverse background, bringing fusion flavors into her recipes.

I can never be bored with the list of websites on Mimmie29’s bookmarks. They provide me with helpful links and in addition, bring surprises to sites that intrigue my interest. Mimmie29 is indeed my soul mate, someone I intend to spend the rest of my life with...bookmarking!