"Internet" news and stories

Wolfgang Puck. Photo: Lisa Romerein.

Celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck has been sued over his attempt to develop the .food domain in cyberspace.

Minds+Machines, a company that had partnered with the Spago restaurant owner on the project, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Tuesday alleging breach of contract as well as tortious interference and fraud on the part of Puck's wife, Gelila. The suit demands $5 million from the Pucks.

Earlier this year, Wolfgang Puck and Gelila Puck had announced their partnership with the company to develop .food Internet addresses.

"This is a great way for the finest food enterprises to stand out from the crowd on the Internet," Puck said in June. "Owning a .FOOD address is like opening a business on the best street in any city in the world."

When 8-year-old Asheville, North Carolina girl Wild Freeborn enlisted her dad's help to set up a cookie-selling website, all she wanted to do was hawk enough Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties to earn her troop a trip to summer camp. Sounds smart, right? After all, any savvy entrepreneur needs a website.

At first, Freeborn's strategy worked, reports Newsweek: She sold more than 700 boxes of cookies to local residents through the online form, delivering every box herself.

But some parents got mad, citing unfair advantage, and Girl Scout officials quickly demanded that Wildborn take the website down, pointing to the Girl Scouts of America's longstanding ban on online sales. "The safety of our girls is always our chief concern. Girl Scout Cookie activities are designed to be face-to-face learning experiences for the girls," says the Girl Scout website.

Many people see this ban as silly and archaic, since the point of selling Girl Scout cookies is to raise money and teach entrepreneurship to young girls. And the future of entrepreneurship is certainly in online marketing, not going door-to-door Avon Lady-style. I say the Girl Scouts should get with the times and not punish girls for using their smarts and taking advantage of their resources.

What do you think - should the Girl Scouts ban online cookie sales?

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All the talk in the wine world these days (besides the imploding economy) centers around one Big Question: how to capture the love and loyalty of the 70-million Millennial generation?

Millennials (born between 1977 and 1998) are already wine drinkers. Data from the Wine Market Council shows that 40 percent of 21-and-over Millennials drink wine. Millennials are willing to try new things, they explore value regions around the world, and they aren't incredibly loyal to specific brands.

Which is why the wine world is falling all over itself trying to capture that loyalty, and in the Millennials' own medium: the Internet. Kim Crawford, the New Zealand winery famous for its zingy Sauvignon Blanc, is on Facebook with events, videos, and podcasts. California's Twisted Oak Winery has a (very popular) wine blog. Wineries from Chateau Haut-Brion, a grand cru in Bordeaux, to Iron Horse Vineyards, a sparkling wine producer in California, are Twittering (or is that Tweeting?).

The question is, are Millennials listening? Part of me thinks wineries have to embrace social media to stay alive, and part of me thinks that wineries embracing social media is about as cool as one's high school teacher dressing like he's still 16. What do you think? Vote in the poll below!

I was just wandering the web when I stumbled across an article on Yahoo Finance about Shortcuts, a new service of AOL. This is a totally paperless, online coupon program linked to store loyalty cards. Shortcuts makes it easy to click, shop, and save; on the products you buy every week.

The way it works is that customers go to the Shortcuts website and link coupons for products to their customer loyalty cards. then when your card is scanned the coupon automatically is applied to your purchase. It's a fantastic idea that makes it easy with no coupon cutting and remembering to bring them with you. There's also the "green" aspect of the program in cutting down on paper use and waste.

So far the service is only offered to Kroger's and affiliate stores customers, but that should change soon. For a growing list of all the partner stores click here.

Broccoli forests sprouting from powdered cumin soil. A cauliflower coral reef. A pea pod boat drifting on a sunset sea of pink salmon.

London photographer Carl Warner constructs elaborate landscapes made completely of food, from mozzarella clouds to an entire village sculpted from chunks of Parmesan. There's a photo gallery of his work up on the BBC website. It looks look ultra-time consuming and amazingly cool.

We clearly have a deep-seated fascination with edible landscapes - think about the candy testing room in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with its lollipop plants and chocolate river, or the lunch pail trees in Return to Oz. Or remember the town of Chewandswallow, where it rained juice and snowed mashed potatoes in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a seminal text for the (4-year old) budding foodie?

Anyway, check out the photos. They'll have you gnawing on the nearest tree limb.

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