Feedmelah.com, As Seen In The Malay Mail!

Following on from our short article in The Star Newspaper, Feedmelah.com were recently given the honour of being interviewed by the Malay Mail newspaper!

This time round, it was a full page spread all about our team, what we aimed for our site and other little titbits about our restaurant directory and food blog.

We’ve really been extremely lucky for such a new food website and again we’d like to thank our readers for your continued support.

A big thanks goes out to Gabey from the Malay Mail who ‘spotted’ our site and for featuring us!

Here’s the article taken from the Malay Mail Online (minus the photos):

WHEN it comes to the search for food, many would argue that it is the hunt itself that is half the fun; a hark back to humanity’s past perhaps?

But then again, we are living in the 21st century, the digital age of easy access to information – thanks to a handy little feature called a search engine (Google, anyone?).

So wouldn’t it make sense for someone to do the dirty work and compile a searchable directory of every possible place to eat in Malaysia?

It certainly did to the three enterprising foodies behind Feedmelah.com – a food blog and restaurant directory – whose goal is to do just that.

For William, Sue Ann and Steven, the 25-year-old minds behind this endeavour, it was the transition from studying in Melbourne, Australia, to working in Kuala Lumpur that sparked this idea.

“While studying in Melbourne, we could find anything and everything to eat with the click of a mouse. Including maps, directions, menus, telephone numbers, etc. Anything you wanted to find could be found in seconds.

“When we came back home, it became increasingly harder to find places to eat. Most of it was done via word-of-mouth or we had to rely on incomplete information from whatever websites we could find,” explains William in an email interview.

It can’t be denied that the Malaysian food blogosphere has become quite crowded but that’s the beauty of the Internet, there is always room for one more and along with it, a chance to make it big.

As William notes: “Our aim is to become Malaysia’s number one restaurant directory and food blog. Wish us luck, we’re going to need it!”

When did you start?

We officially launched the Feedmelah.com blog (http://feedmelah.com/) on Sept 30, 2008. We’ve recently undergone a major revamp on the site and added a restaurant directory on the homepage (http://feedmelah.com) on top of our regularly updated blog. The directory itself has just under 2,000 restaurants, which we intend to grow even larger.

What were your reasons?

With our love of food, we decided that we could start a food website of our own, giving people the simplest, best and fastest option to search for restaurants online. Hence Feedmelah.com was born.

We’ve built the foundations for what we intended to achieve, but our site still has many more upgrades to be done before it’s where we really want it to be.

What makes FeedMeLah.com so different?

With Feedmelah.com, our main aim was to make things simpler and easier. Our tagline on the homepage is: “Finding somewhere to eat has never been easier.” And we try and stay true to that.

We’ve made our website simple to use, allowing people to search for restaurants by cuisine, location, or both. At one glance, you’ll be able to see where the restaurants are (via Google Maps), as well as the most important information about them.

Unlike other food websites out there, ours is not just a food blog, where searching for food is rather cumbersome (due to the sequential nature of a blog), it isn’t incomplete, complicated to use or clustered with excessive information (like some of the restaurant directories out there).

As for the blog itself, with three contributors, we’re able to update it more often than a regular food blog, keeping our content fresh.

Any regrets?

Personally, I regret underestimating how much money it would take to make our website grow to the scale and speed that we would have liked. Oh and we all regret not having the metabolism of Michael Phelps.

Has it changed your life?

Besides an expanding waist line, we’ve all noticed that our friends, family and even strangers are really supportive of what we’ve done with the site.

There’s always another encouragement around the corner, or another friend telling us about a great place they ate at and would be happy to take us there as well.

What would you really like to achieve through Cyberspace communication?

We’re exploring ways in which we can leverage on the popularity of our site to help charities and aid organisations in Malaysia and internationally.

So far this year we’ve supported Earth Hour and hope to support more causes such as the World Food Programme (United Nations), UNICEF and the National Cancer Society of Malaysia.

Absolute favourite blogger?

For me it’s Gizmodo.com For Sue Ann, masak-masak.blogspot.com and for Steve it’s EatingAsia.typepad.com

Foremost feature in the Blogosphere that amazes you?

With the power of the Internet, a blog can speak to and impact so many people at the same time. For good, this voice is able to make a huge difference – for the better.

At the same time, it irritates me when someone uses the same power to instigate hate and invoke violence among their followers.

If there were someone you could influence to take up blogging, who would it be?

I’ll have to go with someone famous but not real – Darth Vader. It would be such a funny blog: ‘Met Luke yesterday, wanted to have a battle to the death, but he escaped. Oh well, will try again tomorrow.’

Additional thoughts?

If you want to know where best to eat (besides searching on our site), ask your older relatives. You’ll be surprised how much they know about food and which deep, dark, corner of KL, PJ or beyond you should try it.

We hope people will enjoy using our site to search for restaurants, or our blog to keep up with our food news, reviews and more.

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