This is a little offtopic to this tribe, but just a little bit tied in to food blogging in general.

I've been thinking a lot about odors (see this old blog post for why: people.tribe.net/a8423872-...7faea1ee). Odors are a huge component of what we think of as food 'flavors'- and have been thinking about how to eventually do a web page that brings together people who are interested in the geeky subject of odor. Smells are notoriously hard to describe accurately- there's an awesome book called What The Nose Knows that talks about the components of the 'chords' that make up familiar smells (did you know that mercaptan, a nasty compound found in skunk scent, is also a distinctive component of the smell of both baby poop and tomato paste?).

Anyway, I started a Twitter.com #hashtag called #scentscape. ( A 'scentscape' is a term from the What The Nose Knows book (I think) describing the background odors of any given place, just as a landscape is a visual background for the world around you.)

#Hashtags are a way to search twitter posts that someone's trying to tie in to a specific theme (for instance #inauguration was a popular one in January). The point is to get whatever your post is to come up in searches for specific topics- for those who are trying to search twitter-wide for trends and other real-time conversation phenomena. Giving it a # means it'll turn up as a link in your Twitter post, and any curious friends who click on the link will get search results of other posts with that term. Here's an example of my and my friend's #scentscape search (I wrote a lot of scentscape posts before realizing I should add a hashtag, the #) currently: twitter.com/search

My idea is that "thinking about odor" or "talking about odor" isn't something that you're likely to blog about, or discuss in a discussion forum, but it's a perfect use of Twitter (other than the short 140-character limit that gets in the way of the language problem when discussing smells). I've twittered about the smell of the sea, the way that the smell of a McDonald's bears not the slightest resemblance to any smell found in your home kitchen, the way the ghetto auto parts store parking lot smelled like a weird combination of gear oil and a burning Burger King grill, the fact that brass has a strong odor that sticks to your skin after touching brass objects, about things that specific smells remind me of, etc. None of this would have been worthy of a full blog entry, but I think that the more people do it, the more interesting the Twitter search will become.

Why read about smells? well, for one thing, it's super hard to talk about smells without trying to describe them as comparisons (ie "smells like something floral" or "smells like hot metal"). One explanation for this lies in our brain architecture- the part of the brain that processes odors is very poorly connected to the language centers. However, smells notoriously evoke memories- again, because of brain architecture. So I think focusing on your sense of smell is an enriching experience.

Try some searches on Google for 'odor' or 'smell' or 'sense of smell'. It's not all that interesting, there's just not that much on the internet about odors and one of our major senses, other than from the persepctive of wine or perfume industries . Yet.. this is one our our major senses, people, and it's so inextricably linked with emotions and memories in some cases.

Let's play.