Hopefully by now you've heard of Flickr, the popular online photo-sharing website. If you ever look at the photo credits for images on Slashfood, chances are you'll see a lot of them come from Flickr. If you are familiar with Flickr, then you might know they've recently added a video sharing option, and some people are not happy about that.

I really don't understand it, but according to Wired plenty of Flickr users are joining groups like "No Video On Flickr". Some other users, though, have a different opinion. A group has popped up to mock the anti video sharing crowd, and this group demands that Flickr give everyone a donut! The "We Demand Free Donuts" group proclaimed that if they got 20,000 members Flickr would have to give in to pressure. Well, Flickr gave in, even though the group only has about 2,500 members so far. If you happen to be in San Francisco today you can go to the meet up and get a free donut.

Victory is so sweet!

I was watching an episode of some Emeril show recently in which Emeril adds chili-infused vodka to his Bloody Mary. I remember thinking that I just HAD to do this, but by the time I turned off the TV, I had forgotten the steps and lost my motivation. This happens frequently, which is why I love the Food Network web site.

I may be primarily re-inspired, however, by a how-to post over at WIRED about vodka infusion. The process described works with number of fruits and vegetables, and I think it would be fun to try a bunch at once and do some taste testing. At any rate, attempts will likely surpass the one made by some friends last spring to infuse vodka into a watermelon (though I've seen it work before, I'll bet the process goes a lot smoother when you infuse the fruit into the drink, and not vice versa).

Anyone have vodka infusion success (or failure) stories to share? Fruits or veggies that work especially well?

I used to read Wired mag religiously, in the late 90s and early 00s (I think that's what we're calling this decade, right?). But I don't read it that much anymore. I'll skim through it at the bookstore and if there's an article that grabs my attention I'll read it, but I don't usually buy it. Which is ironic, considering I'm online 22.5 hours a day now, compared to when I read it all the time.

Anyway, Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto is in the news again, and this time it's for chocolate. Rossetto and Timothy Childs have started a chocolate company named Tcho, and the chocolate is now available. The chocolate is still in beta mode, as Rossetto says. Right now you have to order it through the web site and pick it up at their HQ in San Francisco. I'm sure that will change and they'll have mail order, or ordering it next Christmas is going to be really cumbersome for people if they have to travel from the East Coast to pick it up.

Not every home cook is content with working with the usual tools of the home kitchen, especially not if they follow the ideas and techniques of molecular gastronomists like Grant Achatz or Ferran Adria (or Steven and Marcel from Top Chef, for that matter). Wired has come up with a gift list for cooks interested in practicing nanogastronomy in their own home.

The first, and most obvious, gift that they suggest is a trip to one of the havens of molecular gastronomy, like El Bulli in Spain, Alinea or Moto in Chicago, WD-50 in New York, or The Fat Duck in England. Heston Blumenthal's Kitchen Chemistry includes a cd with video clips to help provide visuals for the technical information included in the book. Once the basics are in place, all the would-be chef needs are tools. Try an insulated whipped cream maker for experimenting with hot and cold mousses, a vacuum sealer for sous vide cooking or a dehydrator (also useful for raw foodists who need gifts) for turning otherwise wet foods into powders and garnishes.

Wired News has a hilarious analysis of limited-edition sugary cereals inspired by summer movies. All of us out here in the bloggosphere owe a debt of gratitude to Lore Sjöberg, who took one for the team by sampling these insulin-shock inducing breakfast cereals.

He leads off with Kellogg's Pirates of the Caribbean, which he quickly dismisses as sort of a combination of Cocoa Puffs and Count Chocula, not that that's a bad thing. His description of the chocolate pearl-shaped cereal with pirate-shaped marshmallows had me busting a gut. He likens the marshmallows to bowler hats, extracted incisors and a silhouette of Bob Ross. Guess they couldn't figure out how to make it look like Johnny Depp.

Cream cheese was developed in America in 1872. It is unusual, different from other cheeses, not because of its smooth creamy texture, but because of how it is made. While many cheeses are thickened with an enzyme in rennet, cream cheese is thickened with the addition of an acid.

That may sound like a reasonably simple process, but the truth is the cream cheese is hard to make. And when things go wrong and the cheese comes out smelling like "dirty socks, cardboard, or Robitussin," companies have to call in the experts. Enter the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Dairy Research (UWCDR), where scientists do research to unlock the secrets of cream cheese and help manufacturers solve any problems that come up.

On the heels of a great Harpers article about the business of pig breeding, Wired recently ran a piece about the sequencing pig genomes. Once the process is complete, breeders will be able to determine which pigs will taste best prior to slaughter as well as which will have the best yield and be less prone to disease. From there, these qualities can be built upon and accentuated.

The gist of the Harpers piece (which I don"t think is available on-line) is that there"s currently a movement among some of America"s largest pork producers to move back to a less lean, more complexly flavored type of pork. This move away from what the author calls "the chickenifaction of the American pig" is done by introducing stock from pigs (via pig sperm banks) that have not been bred so intensely.

Both are definitely worth a read if you"re interested in the fine tuning of livestock.

[Wired article via The Food Section]