We've seen the Wikipedia model applied to car design, a video dictionary and an online publishing platform. The latest? Foodista, an online cooking encyclopedia whose recipes can be edited by anyone.

Launched late last year, Seattle-based Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world's largest, highest-quality cooking encyclopedia. The site says it is the first to organize and cross-link the basic elements of cooking: foods, or the basic ingredients; recipes, or combinations of ingredients; cooking techniques; and kitchen tools. Rather than include hundreds of recipes for the same basic result, however—the way many recipe sites do—Foodista aims instead to perfect a few key recipes through the collaborative editing process. Thousands of high-resolution photos from the Flickr.com Creative Commons currently illustrate the topics on the site—though not the results of specific recipes, as TechCrunch points out—and users can also upload their own photos. Content is fully editable, and a raft of tools aimed at food bloggers include embeddable widgets to forge automated links from Foodista to specific food blogs. Ultimately, Foodista plans to support itself through online advertising.

Will a thousand cooks produce a better recipe, as the site implicitly promises? Or will the collaborative process reduce each of the site's recipes to the most bland, lowest-common-denominator version, as TechCrunch suggests it might? Time will tell. In the meantime, one to watch—or get involved in? (Related: 52 recipe contests to spawn crowdsourced cookbook — Personalized cooking: recipes match cravings — Customized cookbooks stir in online recipes.)

Website: www.foodista.com
Contact: www.foodista.com/contact

Spotted by: Murtaza Ali Patel

Puzzle books are big sellers, but generally not much to look at. Aiming to capture that gap in the market is a series of eyecatching, pocket-sized books. The Pocket Posh line includes about two dozen books, which retail for USD 7.99. Each features 100 puzzles: crosswords, hangman, word searches, logic puzzles and various forms of sodoku.

Floral and geometric designs grace their covers, and the books have rounded corners and elastic band closures that mimic Moleskine notebooks. Developed by The Puzzle Society and published by Andrews McMeel, Pocket Posh is targeting female puzzlers. Proof once again that everything can be upgraded to appeal to design-sensitive consumers. One for other publishers to be inspired by? (Related: Toilet seat covers, upgraded — Chic vomit bags for morning-sick moms.)

Website: www.andrewsmcmeel.com
Contact: www.andrewsmcmeel.com/contact.html

What's better than reading? Having someone read to you. Even better—having the author read to you. When book lovers visit an author's reading, they generally know his or her work. Aiming to introduce readers to authors they aren't yet familiar with, zehnSeiten (German for ten pages) promotes writers through videos that feature them reading ten pages from their latest novel.

Available both online and as an iPhone app, the videos are simple, fixed-camera affairs. No dramatic introductions or filmed scenes, just black and white recordings of authors sitting at a table and reading from their work. By eliminating frills, the focus is on the author and production time and costs are kept to a minimum. Videos range in length from ten to thirty minutes and feature work from a variety of publishers. New recordings are added weekly. zehnSeiten is the brainchild of five friends from Munich—an idea they had over drinks. It's a concept that's easily adaptable to others categories or other countries, at relatively low cost.

Website: www.zehnseiten.de
Contact: info@zehnseiten.de

Spotted by: Franziska Luh

P.S. For those of you who don't speak German, zehnSeiten adds that Tim Parks' and Paul Beatty's videos are in English.

Along with yoga's rise in popularity has come a raft of DVD and online classes offering a potentially less expensive and more convenient alternative to live, scheduled instruction. Such prerecorded offerings often focus on the fittest and most photogenic yogis, however—without the real-world masses—which may be good for education, but can be demoralizing for those who are less than perfectly toned and proficient. Enter YogaVibes, a site that offers recordings of real-world yoga classes, complete with fellow classmates in all shapes and sizes.

North Carolina-based YogaVibes offers a wide variety of online classes of varying lengths and difficulty levels, taught by actual yoga instructors from top studios around the world. Rather than situating those instructors against breathtaking backdrops for glossy, fully staged productions, however, the classes featured are real ones with real students of all ability levels. The site explains: "Our classes are authentic. With few exceptions, we film real students, who come in all shapes, sizes and abilities. We know they’ll inspire your yoga practice, both on and off the mat." A series of free vignettes are available on YogaVibes, as are an assortment of paid classes, which are typically priced at USD 10 for 14-day access. Alternatively, a Class Pass offers five full-length online classes for 30 days for USD 20. YogaVibes gives five percent of its class fees to charities including yogaHOPE, Yoga Bear and Street Yoga.

It seems reasonable that just as consumers value the opinions of twinsumers when making purchase decisions, so they value the inclusion of others at—and even below—their own ability level when learning something new. The lesson to be learned? Co-consumers can remain a critical part of the equation, even in an online setting; remove them, and you may just remove part of your service's value.

Website: www.yogavibes.com
Contact: www.yogavibes.com/pages/contact

Spotted by: Sarah Anne Jackson

It's been less than a year since the launch of Stack, the curated subscription service that samples a variety of independent magazines each month. We covered the UK-based service last December, just after it launched, so were pleased to learn recently that it's already expanding to North America.

Just to recap, the original Stack service offers readers a choice of receiving six, eight or 12 issues delivered each year. Subscribers never know exactly which magazines they'll get in any given month because Stack selects what it sees as the best issue from among a roster of multiple indie magazines, including UK-based Bad Idea and Electric Sheep, and Netherlands-based Foam. Now, with the launch of Stack America this week, the service is available in a version tailored to American consumers as well. The magazines sent out by Stack America will be different from those chosen for the original Stack service, focusing primarily—but not exclusively—on magazines made in the US, Canada and South America. The first delivery will go out in early January, Pricing for delivery of six magazines per year is USD 71.99 for the US, USD 119.99 for Canada, USD 139.99 for Mexico and USD 159.99 for the rest of the world.

Andrew Losowsky, CEO of New England-based Stack America, explains: "There’s a huge wealth of independent magazines made in America, and there are lots of readers who want to get hold of them. But there are problems of marketing and distribution—small magazines find it hard to promote themselves effectively, and with many Americans living out of reach of a good magazine store, it can often be impossible for people to discover and pick up new titles." Like Meatpaper, which will be the first magazine that Stack America sends out.

Similar in many ways to the curated offerings we recently covered from Hipstery and ShoeDazzle, ad-supported Stack may just have hit upon a model that will make independent magazines sustainable. The company's expansion to the US, meanwhile, "paves the way to more franchises in the future," founder Steve Watson says. One to bring to independent readers in *your* neck of the woods...?

Website: www.stackmagazines.com
Contact: info@stackmagazines.com