Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Malaysia Food Contribution System

Malaysia Most Wanted Food provide various way for you to contribute information about the yummylicious Malaysia food & restaurant, where you can recommend a place, write a review, drop a comment, provide a link, submit our own images, or be a food bloggers.

How does the contribution system work?
We allow users and non-users to contribute information. For those who Join as a user, you get:
  • A Personal Profile page with you name, description, website, avatar, plus all your contribution shown here
  • All your contributions shall be logged under your account, with a POP (Popularity) score to represent the current level of contribution
  • You don’t have to key in the annoying Captcha (Verification with Picture and Characters)



How to contribute?
Recommendation. If you know of a good place which MMW Food have not covered yet, feel free to recommend it to us (or view the list of recommendation). Just fill in the Name of the Place, Specialty, Location and Others information.



Information. Visit any food venue page and you shall see an orange color Contribute Info button (right under the maroon red information box). Use this to contribute information such as location/direction, specialty, contact number, business hour, etc.


Image. If you have photos/pictures of yummy food, you can upload them to the relevant food venue. Click on the Submit Image button and provide information such as Source Name, Image Title, URL (website address if available, as we shall provide a link back) and upload the image file.


Links. If you happen to stumble upon an interesting food article, or you wrote one, feel free to click on Submit Link.


Review. Click on Submit Review to write a short review of this place. You could rate this place at the same time.


Comment. If you would drop a line or post a question or just some ranting, you could click on Submit Comment. Review is a more serious evaluation of the venue, while Comment is more free and easy.


What if I am a Food Blogger?
We always believe MMW Food could not be the only place to review yummylicious food, and a lot of creative bloggers would very much like to create their own food kingdom as well. If you are a food blogger, drop us an email at info [at] malaysiamostwanted [dot] com, and we could arrange for a full archival of your food blog into MMW Food. It works something like how Google archive your blog so that other people could find it. We know how to respect your copyrighted content :)

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Enhance Malaysia Food Picture Viewer

Malaysia Most Wanted Food has thousands of food pictures contributed by food bloggers around the country. We need the images to make us salivate and feel very very hungry.

We have recently upgraded the image viewer to allow full screen viewing of the image (the picture preview used to be much smaller). Search for any of your favourite food venues page, look under the Image section and you sell see a lot of small little images to give a quick preview.


Click on any of the images to see a bigger image which gives you a clearer picture.


You can navigate to the next picture by clicking on the left portion of the image itself, where it would show a Next label. Click on it to see the next picture. You can see the previous picture by clicking on the left portion of the picture. You can also navigate between next and previous and hitting the left and right arrow key on your keyboard. If you feel lazy, you can click the Play button and enjoy a slideshow of all the subsequent pictures, starting from the current one. If you want to stop viewing the images, you could either click Stop or hit the ESC key.


Sometimes it doesn’t have any pictures under the images section, because no one had contributed any images yet. You could contribute some images by clicking the “Submit Image” button.


Feel free to join us and contribute toward the Malaysia Food Community :)

Search for Malaysia Food by Location and Cusine

Sometimes we don’t have a particular craving, but we want something nice, thus we need some simple recommendations and options. Malaysia Most Wanted Food provides a quick and easy way to allow you to search for good food by location and cuisine.

Click on the Locations tab on the main page and you shall see a list of popular food destination around Malaysia. That in large fonts represents places which are more popular (more food venues), while the smaller and lighter colour ones have less options. Just click on your favourite spot and see what kind of food is waiting for you.


You can search for a food venue by Cuisine as well, where the big and red ones are more popular with more options.


Happy food hunting, and let us know of any nice and secret place to eat :)

Thursday, November 29, 2007

How to search for Malaysia Food, accurately?

We have put in quite a few efforts to make the search engine for Malaysia Most Wanted Food to return more relevant result.


First of all we have the basic search, where you could search by the keyword Chicken Rice. Chicken Rice would return result which contains the word Chicken OR Rice, which mean things about Lemon Chicken, Fried Chicken, Yam Rice, Duck Rice shall be returned as well. So, we should put a double quote(“”) around the word “Chicken Rice” to ensure the search result match the whole word, not just Chicken OR Rice. This shall narrow down your search result and hopefully it will return something more relevant to what you have in mind.

You could narrow down your search further by searching specifically the cuisine or location. For example, location:puchong shall return all the food venues in Puchong, or cuisine:thai to find some thai food. You could search for multiple cuisine or location at the sametime, for example cuisine:japanese indian.

Now that you know how to search by location and cuisine, you could then search by keyword + location + cuisine. For example, fine dining location:bangsar cusine:french. Remember that you could still use the double quote (“”) to force exact word match and to narrow down the search result.


From the search result, you could perform a sorting on the name, location, state, cuisine, special, vote and POP by clicking on the little green round button (with 2 little triangle facing up and down) on the header. Click once to sort by ascending order (A-Z), and click again to sort by descending order (Z-A). You could sort by Vote or POP (Popularity Index of the food).

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Malaysia Most Wanted Food Elevator Pitch

I notice I haven’t quite setup the identity of MMW Food, or rather to answer the question “What is Malaysia Most Wanted Food?” under 60 seconds (Elevator Pitch). This version is targeted to the users rather than the venture capitalist.


What is MMW Food?
It helps you to find delicious food recommended by food lovers around the country.

What pain does it solve?

Need a new place to have lunch or can’t find the perfect restaurant for a romantic dinner? We help you find the perfect place to eat based on your preferred cuisine and location, listening to independent and critical recommendations by thousands of food lovers from all walks of life.

What is the benefit?
  • The recommendations are neutral (people will criticized if the food is really bad, and they are not paid to do advertisement) and everyone is allowed to do a review and contribute information.
  • It allows easy searching by keyword, location, cuisine, etc.
  • It shows you what is the most popular food in town; and it helps you to get there with maps and directions.

Malaysia Food: The Most Wanted Version

Problem to Solve: To identify which is actually the most wanted food in Malaysia, or at least the most popular, or most visited, or most bloged about. Basically, Show me the yummy food!


It’s not an easy task, and neither do we have the perfect answer, but we should have a pretty good idea (at least we try our best). First came the Malaysia Most Viewed Food Venues (click on "TOP 50" tab on the main page), which a pretty simple methods utilizing Google Analytics to track which is the most viewed food venues on a month by month basic, or year by year, or the all time favourite. Like the title implied, you get to know what other people are viewing (and perhaps eating as well).


Then we have the Malaysia Most Wanted Food Venues, which we use a special (and secret) algorithm/formula to calculate a magic number for a specific food venue based on the number of user contributed content, voting and page view. Based on this magic number, we are able to compare one food venue against the other; and give you a good idea on whether one food venue is more popular than the other.


We use a bar chart in the search result to show you how popular is this food venue (full bar mean it can't get any better, haha).



And we display the magic number to indicate its popularity.

Of course, we can only perform Malaysia food popularity analysis on food venues recommended by users, or archived by MMW. I know it's unfair to some-extremely-delicious-food-venue-but-not-acrhived-by-mmw-yet, so we would try harder to find and archive more food venues (of course, you could help too).

PS: I wonder is there a better word to replace food venue to replace the combination reference to “restaurant, cafĂ©, food stall, mamak, pasar malam, food court, etc”.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Google Map on Malaysia Food

One of the problem of good food is finding them (literally), especially when you are unfamiliar with neighborhood. On top of the usual address and directions, Malaysia Most Wanted Food is now integrated with Google Maps, which provide the actual road and highway name of Malaysia (and statelite images as well). Not all food venues have google map support at this moment, but we are working on getting as much coordinates as possible (or perhaps you could contribute some).

For example, you get the usual Map, Statelite or Hybrid (a cool combination of actual road Map and Statelite images).







Not only that, you get to view the map in full screen in order to get a better view, or export the map to Google Earth as your bookmark while tapping into the Google Map Community contributions. In fact, you can export food venues within 3km radius of your current selected venues.



Feel free to recommend us your favorite food spot, and give us your comment and feedback :)

Monday, April 16, 2007

How to be a Professional Food Blogger?

Malaysia Most Wanted (MMW) Food had been operational for quite a while now, and we had been trying to archive as much food blogs as possible. At the same time, we face some problems with very delicious looking food posts but lack vital information such as location and name of the place.

Below is a simple guidelines on how to be a Professional Food Blogger, in our effort to help food lovers to search for tasty and yummy food around Malaysia.

DO
  • A camera is a must, where it could be a digital camera or camera phone (at least 1 Megapixel).
  • Take a photo of the outlook or entrance or signboards of the venue
  • Take a photo of their business card or address
  • Take a photo of the content of their menu (don’t need to snap every page)
  • Take a few more photo of the delicious food you ordered, with a brief description of what is it
  • Write down the name of the place
  • Write down the full address (at least the area, like SS2) or direction to the place
  • If possible, get the business hour, price range, phone number, ambience
  • Write a delicious review (if the food sucks, let others know as well)
  • Let us know of their specialty
  • Rate them (1 star for lousy, 5 star for heavenly yummy)

DON’T
  • Don’t review more than 1 venue in a single post (separate them into individual postings)
  • Don’t forget the name of the place and location (take a photo of the signboard or name card if possible) – a good food is useless if people can’t find them

Happy hunting and blogging!

Monday, January 15, 2007

500 new property projects in Malaysia

MMW had archived 500 new property projects in Malaysia to date, hurray! Though the list is far from complete, but we are getting bigger and better by the day. Although MMW is not really a big corporation with endless resources at her disposal, but we are dedicated to make minor improvement along the way, including
  • The much delayed and anticipated statistical data about Malaysia property market
  • Migration of MMW Property to a newer platform (like MMW Food) which allow user contribution (review, comment, etc), to make it easier to find information and hopefully providing a better user experience besides trying to be more relevant
  • And continue to provide as much information about Malaysia property market as possible.
And happy belated new year 2007!