IT's ironic, but Malaysians probably talk about food most of the times than any other nations as a whole. And many even blog about it. Just type in "char koay teow", "cendol", or "assam laksa", and your search engine will overwhelm you with tonnes of links to picture-filled blogs. If local food bloggers have already had their fill, they then move to blogging about some other places.

People tend to take blogs literally.

It’s nice to relate how good your experience is as a patron but sadly, it’s all too superficial and there’s perhaps a glut of food bloggers lately and none really cares who fried that plate of “char koay teow” or how “cendol” came about, let alone how it’s made.

It’s all too obvious that patron walks in, sits down, takes a digital compact camera out and starts snapping close-up shots of everything on the table, or everything else that catches his/her fancy in the restaurant. I suppose this must be a restaurant owner’s worst nightmare – food bloggers anonymous!

Who needs A, B, C grades when you’ve got first-hand experience? But can you really take a blogger’s word for it?

Sometimes you get blogs from all over the world. There’s a blogger who posted a video review of an iPhone (apparently), knowingly or unknowingly that it’s a China-made knock-off. Often times, people take blogs literally. They ramble and just because it’s in a form of published online media with lots of hits, this doesn’t make it official.

Unscrupulous manufacturers, upon seeing the hits on a blog, will often tempt bloggers to review their products, lop-sided as always, and it always sounds scripted.

But there has to be an easier way to find local blogs. And the truth is, there’s plenty of those who wish to be found.

Malaysia Central has a listing by industry at http://www.mycen.com.my/malaysia/blog.html while BlogMalaysia.com (http://blogmalaysia.com/).

It is apparently a “human edited Web directory” for bloggers who submit and promote user’s blogs through search engines and advertisements. It even has its very own featured blogger, for free!