Did you see this?

It’s an article in today’s LA Times Food Section. It’s about the ethics of food blogging, written by Elina Shatkin.

It’s timely and very interesting, I’d even say newsworthy.

I have given a lot of thought to the ethics of SippitySup. I don’t really do restaurant reviews. Which is the focus of this article. But I might someday. Still many of the points in this article are quite relevant to so many of us, and may be worth a little soul searching.

Every time I post a recipe I think about its accreditation. I am not sure I have ever run a recipe that was absolutely someone else’s (except my mother’s and brother’s). I often find recipes I love from a variety of sources. But I tweak them to suit my tastes and cooking skills. I then say it was adapted from a source. I will often say that a chef or cookbook inspired a recipe when I took a broad concept and made quite a few changes.

But after that there is some gray area.

You know I have been a fan of StumbleUpon for several months. But like so many of these social networking tools I have come to find that I was not really taking advantage of all it has to offer. I want to pass along a few things I have learned in order to encourage you to use and benefit from the community building aspects of StumbleUpon.

In the food specific blogworld, sites like FoodGawker, Photograzing and TasteSpotting can indeed drive traffic to your blog. They are great at helping you build brand recognition, but their format actively discourages the reading of your material. So they really only service food-blog lovers, and only one type (albeit, a very important type) of food-blog lover.

Facebook is great for bragging rights and announcing new posts and reconnecting with your high-school BFF. But it can only go so far towards bringing you new readers. Which (for me) is what blogging is all about, readers!

Twitter is at least for “readers”. It is a lot of fun and can quickly make you a twitterstar, which will undoubtedly help your blog. But it is time consuming and a destination all its own for most of its users.

To me StumbleUpon is an amalgamation of all these social media outlets. It is great way for enhancing the image of your blog, it encourages cross-pollination of many types of blog lovers (not just foodies) and it’s unmatched in building an audience.