Another of the cool people I met last week in New York was David Ziegler, founder of Foodist Colony - a community website that allows food lovers to share restaurant recommendations. The community has been growing rapidly since David launched the site two years ago. There are lots of cool features to save people time: content is aggregated from the best food bloggers/websites and presented as a map mash-up.

Community members can rate and comment on restaurants and this creates an attention index of the top and buzziest restaurants. There are restaurant charts. Users can create a personal restaurant guide and share this with others. They can follow other people whose recommendations they find useful. And they can even book restaurants. Foodist Colony also launched a highly successful iPhone web app a few months ago, and this was featured at Apple.com as Apple’s ‘Staff Pick’. As a measure of the site’s success, it’s impressive that a whopping 73% of all registered users have bothered to build a personal restaurant guide. This is a vibrant, living community.

The site currently serves the good folk of New York, but it’s obviously an idea that would work well in other cities both in the US and beyond. There are widgets - see a couple of example here and here. And of course there’s a Twitter page, which I am now following

MyFolia.com, an innovative new online gardening community and organiser that lets you list the plants you want to grow and matches you to gardeners who want to swap seeds. As you’d expect, MyFolia.com is packed with tools to allow gardeners to swap ideas and tips as well, but it’s the seed swapping that drew the attention of a commenter at Lifehacker and has cast a dark cloud over conversations in the groups area of MyFolia:

The seed stash lets you list your cuttings and seeds. Seed saving is a huge movement in the UK and parts of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a grassroots effort on behalf of our vanishing biodiversity and a protest against corporate control of local and global food supplies.

Unfortunately, even without genetically modified plants in the picture, now hybrid plants often also have copyright protections on them.

Canadian Gardening Magazine called it the “Facebook for Gardeners” but the copyright debate makes it sound more like illegal file-sharing. Is this a job for the Creative Commons’ Biological Materials Transfer Project (Science Commons) or is this the start of seed piracy?