July 13th, 2005, 8:55 pm

Give ‘em what they want: the ability to comment without commitment

This is why I love Epicurious.com: great content, with a great interface that just keeps improving. I’ve long loved the site for my ability to save my favorite recipes online, and their awesome ratings system, which allows me to compare notes with other cooks and come up with the version of the recipe I think will work best. And now they’ve added another layer of goodness: the ability for me to add my own notes to the pages that aren’t visible to other users. How great is that for a recipe site, and how neat could it be for a news-site? Imagine the glee of researchers and students, finding your website and adding their own notes — tags, if you will — for future use? Wouldn’t that just guarantee that the users would continue to come and hit up your site, because you’d married your great content with a utility that, well, folks found … useful?