As an old-school Chowhound, cut my teeth as Canchito and then changed my identity to Joey Deckle, I was glad to hear months ago that Jim Leff found an angel in C-Net . Now the site that started as a sprawling food forum and evolved exponentially into a labor of savor would now be recognized and monetized by an organization of like mind and like palate.I knew that Chowound 2.0 was about to hit the street any minute thanks to my fellow Slashfoodies' coverage. But nothing prepared me for clicking on a familiar link at 3AM yesterday and seeing something completely different. A mere six hours earlier, I was scrolling through the site's old-school bulletin-board listings.
I guess never got the press release. All of sudden I found an alien universe looking back from my monitor. As a benchmark, I entered a smorgasbord of topics that had been written about into the site's search field. Sure enough, natto, churrasco and vestedde all turned up. So far so good. But it took me more than a few minutes to find the regional boards and ultimately realize that the hot posts (a summary of all the boards' latest posts) had been folded into the front page.
More than anything my late-night discovery of CH's new launch reminded me of my first experiences with the site. There's a lot of delicousness to be discovered/shared here, I just need to figure out how to serve it up.
