1. Recipe Puppy: Type in any ingredients you already have and recipe puppy will match them to a recipe.

2. Foodie View: A recipe website that incorporates restaurant reviews, search from major blog recipes and a healthy dose of food porn photography.

3. Recipe Matcher: This site is similar to Recipe Puppy but it uses drop downs in its search function.

4. Nibble Dish: Formerly Open Source Food, Nibble Dish is perhaps the best food porn / recipe site in existence. The site offers more than 2000 CC licensed recipes in addition to some extremely gorgeous high resolution images.

5. Top Secret Recipes: This site offers users the chance to take their favorite restaurant recipes and make them at home. Something tells me that the Carl's Jr section isn't going to be very healthy.

6. FoodNetwork: Offers users many of the recipes off the network including food by Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay and Giada de Laurentiis.

7. BBC and NYTimes Recipe Search: Both the BBC and NY Times offer recipe engines for their featured recipes. This is generally for people who are searching for a specific recipe from a previous show or article.

8. The Atlantic Monthly: These guys have an extremely sophisticated recipe site. It reads like the J. Peterman catalogue of food. If you aren't in a hurry, you can get some great recipes here.

9. Epicurious: Epicurious is a Condé Nast site that incorporates recipes from Gourmet, SELF and Bon Appétit. Recipes tend to be a little healthier and the service offers a recipe saving feature for members.

10. Tastebook: This site allows users to bookmark recipes from leading cooking sites as well as add their own recipes. Members can then create a physical cookbook. This is great for gifts.

11. Food.com: This is a recipe bookmarking service. Users can add the browser plugin and select their favorite recipes to save in their Recipe Box.

12. VideoJug: This site, while not specifically meant for cooking instructions, is a wonderful resource for budding cooks.

Chinese: How To Make Crab In Black Bean Sauce

13. Look and Taste: This site offers high quality professional instructional videos. The desserts section looks particularly useful for souffles and creme brulees.

14. All Recipes: This is a site dedicated to user-generated recipes (as opposed to professional recipes). The site also includes instructional video, user photos and a section for slow cooker recipes and a recipe saving tool.

15. Rouxbe: Rouxbe is a community where user-generated recipes are rated, certified and if worthy, made into professional cooking videos. After 30 days users must pay to access video recipes, but text recipes remain free.

16. YouTube: YouTube offers a selection of cooking videos from some great hosts. In particular, Toronto-based Korean cook Maangchi began uploading her videos in 2007 and has since developed a nationwide following complete with meet ups and popular classes across North America.

17. MyDamnChannel: Nobody ever expected rap artist Coolio to host his own cooking show, and it certainly is a fantastic voyage. While you may not find your culinary cravings here, the show is worth a look simply to watch Coolio throw dime bags of spice onto his creations.

18. Chowhound: While the site is perhaps best known for restaurant reviews, Chowhound has a good selection of cooking technique videos. If you can make it past the advertisements, the "You're Doing it All Wrong" series is the most informative.

We know this is just a small taste of the millions of resources available. If you've got a blog or site that you know our readers will love, let us know in the comments below.

Demographics are extrapolated from user panels and multiplied by traffic numbers gleaned from embed codes and presumably ISP data.

Continued below image of search results page.

The search function is primarily targeting ad buyers, just because no one online is willing to pay for anything except ads promoting more monetized mediums, but it is free for anyone to use after creating a Quantcast account.

There are any number of other reasons you might want to use a search service like this. I might be a nonprofit organization, for example, organizing an event that's particularly relevant to a certain demographic group. In that case, making sure I know what some of said group's most popular websites are could prove quite valuable. Asking some people is a good idea too, but a little Quantcast help could be a good first step.

Demographic information can be a touchy subject outside of the ad world, see for example Hillary Clinton's offensive assertion today that she's likely to fair well in the election because non-college educated white people like her best. None the less, though, demographics better engaged with than hidden from.

Room for Improvement

It's not clear how extensive Quantcast's demographic panels are. The company says it gathers this data from "several million" web users. That's great, though I'd like to see what percentage of those millions fall into the different populations they track.

Geographic filtering would sure be great, too, though then we're likely talking about making the pie even smaller and less accurate.

One of the biggest shortcomings of services like Quantcast is that they tend to limit themselves to estimating US traffic. The internet is global, the ad market is too, and some global engagement with geographic filtering seems like a big, open field.

The search here really is just for numbers. It would be awesome to see these demographics integrated into content searches. Quantcast's competitor Compete recently made their data available to users of the Ask.com search engine. This allows searchers to get a feel for the traffic numbers and trends of any site they find search results on. That's pretty handy.

Finally, the ability to filter by traffic trends would be really nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, many of my top search results were sites with falling traffic. What if I wanted to see sites that were growing in total or growing increasingly popular with my target demographic?

Despite its relatively rudimentary beta status, this new offering from Quantcast looks good. It should prove valuable to ad buyers and others and will undoubtedly increase Quantcast's profile online.

What Should They Cover?

This time, Digg is again calling for your input, asking you to let them know what topics you're interested in by posting, digging, or burying comments on this thread.

As Richard mentioned earlier this morning, here at ReadWriteWeb, we've been concerned with many of Digg's problems for some time, specifically favoritism of certain publishers, manually taking power away from power users, manipulating the topics, issues with gaming, charges of censorship, the endless barrage of sensationalism, repetitive lists, and Kevin Rose stories on the frontpage. So, needless to say, we're very excited to see that some topics near and dear to our heart are currently at the top of the list of topics for the upcoming Townhall.

In fact, as it stands right now, a comment about the decline of tech stories on Digg is the number one comment with 146 diggs. We covered that subject back in April, when we released some exclusive graphs created just for us by Richard Cunningham, who utilized the Digg API. Clearly that's a topic important to the Digg community - our story was dugg 2225 times.

Other comments on the Townhall topic suggestion thread include the decline of quality stories in general, biased political coverage, Digg forums, word-based blocking, exposing buries (again!), and other feature suggestions for the site.

The Digg blog post also mentioned the upcoming changes to the comments system, a story that broke on Twitter, when Kevin accidentally (?) posted a link to a video about the new comments system and then quickly took it down.

What topics do you want to see discussed at the next Digg Townhall?

What's more, many of the comments to the Wikipedia post were thoughtful and added to the discussion. OK many of the comments were critical of the post, it must be said. But still, you could tell that people were passionate about the topic. Here's an example, comment 64 from Sandy:

"I use Wikipedia almost everyday. It's a great and very informative website. I look there for info before I check other information websites. And I see how they can get away with this but do I think it is fair and right? Absolutely NOT.

In fact, Poetry.com does the same thing. They have these poetry contests and people from all over are enticed into sending in their own personal work thinking they will be made famous and receive a big prize if they win, etc. But that doesn't happen at all. [...]"

So Yahoo Buzz is not only sending large quantities of traffic to blogs, it is also sending people that want to comment - and who leave interesting, informed comments. By contrast, digg and slashdot traffic usually doesn't result in many extra comments on blogs - those people usually leave their comments on digg / slashdot. That's fair enough, as those two sites have thriving communities. But to me and many other new media publishers, it's yet another plus to Buzz over digg and slashdot.

RWW on yahoo.com

Listen Up, Digg

Also, and I don't mean to harp on about this (but I will), digg's continued systemic problems are not helping them. Favoritism of certain publishers (whereby only a few publishers in each category dominate the digg frontpage), manually taking power off power users, manipulating the topics that get to the digg frontpage, issues with gaming, charges of censorshop, the endless barrage of sensationalism, repetitive lists and Kevin Rose stories on the frontpage - all of these things and more have damaged digg's brand.

Quite simply, Yahoo Buzz is looking more and more like the future of social news. Digg needs to take a few pages from Buzz's book if it's to survive in the mainstream.

Bigger and More Engaged Traffic

ReadWriteWeb has been pretty bullish on Yahoo Buzz. We published one of the few positive reviews of Yahoo! Buzz when it opened, and in March we published some traffic statistics from Yahoo! and called the site a game-changer. As we noted in a recent update, the "Buzz-effect" is potentially orders of magnitude larger than the similar "Digg-effect."

Yahoo Buzz isn't perfect - it is a select number of publishers (although still in my personal view much fairer to publishers than digg) and participation on the Buzz property itself is lower than on digg.

So it's not perfect... but the traffic it sends publishers is both bigger and more engaged with the original content than traffic sent by digg or slashdot.

Piwik originates from France and almost all the attention so far has been from outside USA. It seems to be catching on in Japan and China, as well as in Europe. The team responsible for Piwik seems to be made up of interns from big companies such as Amazon, Intel and even Google.

You need PHP and MySQL to use Piwik, which is no problem for techies but any widespread adoption will need a hosted version. Some entrepreneur is likely to offer that. Plug-ins to WordPress and other blogging platforms will also be needed, but cannot be that hard.

Open source products usually get traction, even when they are raw, when the alternative is too expensive or restrictive. Google Analytics is free, so it is hard to see rapid adoption by bloggers and small media companies. It is possible that Piwik will get better traction in companies that already use one of the expensive web analytics services from companies such as Coremetrics, Omniture and Visual Sciences/Websidestory.

Larger companies may have some pause for concern before switching to Google Analytics, because of the service's Terms of Service. An analyst in the IT department is likely to point out two clauses (yes big companies DO read this stuff):

"2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may change its fees and payment policies for the Service from time to time including but not limited to the addition of costs for geographic data, the importing of cost data from search engines, or other fees charged to Google or its wholly-owned subsidiaries by 3rd party vendors for the inclusion of data in the Service reports."

So, don't go above 5 million page views without paying something to Google via AdWords. That may make one a bit uneasy, but it is the "Google may change its fees and payment policies" that will have both IT and Legal aiming to nix the deal.

Then a bit later on you get:

"6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service. Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties unless Google (i) has Your consent; (ii) concludes that it is required by law or has a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public; or (iii) provides such information in certain limited circumstances to third parties to carry out tasks on Google's behalf (e.g., billing or data storage) with strict restrictions that prevent the data from being used or shared except as directed by Google . When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on Google's instructions and in compliance with this Agreement and appropriate confidentiality and security measures."

In short, they have the right to use your data. We have lived for a long time in a world where Microsoft and others charged for the software and kept it under a tight IP control, but did not try to take any use of the data. Google reversed that. Google is happy to let you use anything for free, as long as they get to use your data. That is OK for most individuals and small businesses, but totally unacceptable for large companies.

Piwik is working hard to be developer-friendly, not just relying on open source. They claim 4 big advantages:

1. Open API
2. Plug in architecture
3. Data abstraction layer
4. Customizable dashboard

But the nub of the issue for most big companies will be the data ownership issue. That is why Piwik is really a Google Analytics alternative, even if they will see few firms switching from GA initially. IT groups, under pressure to cut costs, will look at Google Analytics as an alternative to their current analytics software and reject the option based on TOS restrictions. Then some bright spark will Google the term "open source alternative google analytics" and see Piwik on top of the organic listings.