Sidebar: Martha's Web Recipe

Martha Stewart is more than just an arbiter of good taste. As chair and CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia LLC, she is also a new-media powerhouse -- a world-renowned brand with a high-powered presence in magazines, radio, and TV.

What's Martha Stewart's next frontier? How to bring good taste to the Web. Her site (www.marthastewart.com) debuted in September 1997. Organized into seven content areas -- Home, Cooking & Entertaining, Gardening, Crafts, Holiday, Keeping, and Weddings -- it offers discussion forums, 24-hour bulletin boards, and a weekly question-and-answer hour with Stewart, her editors, and experts. The site has nearly 1 million registered users and has generated 10 million page views in June alone.

In an interview with Fast Company, Stewart discussed her recipe for Web success.

How has Martha Stewart been living on the Web?

At first, our Web site was a program guide for the TV show -- and a way to provide the recipes that appear on the show. The recipes stay up for 10 days. We then added our catalog, Martha by Mail. That business is growing. We also have question-and-answer forums. My editors love doing them. It gives them a chance to interact with our audience on an intimate basis.

What's your long-term hope for the Web?

I want to make our site the deepest, most robust content site in terms of the home and living and the other subjects we're interested in: cooking, entertaining, crafts, gardening, collecting, and keeping. I also want it to be the best e-commerce site around. My editors and I have expertise to offer that can help homemakers choose the products they need. That covers a huge range of products. But besides offering suggestions on what to buy, we also offer instructions for using these products -- an idea bank. The Web is great for making the concept of "living" tangible for our audience.

What makes it such a good tool?

Everybody I know wants the same thing: more time. The Web helps you create more time. I don't need the Web to make friends. I need the Web to give me information, inspiration, and to provide resources to help me find the things that I need.

Coordinates: mstewart@marthastewart.com, www.marthastewart.com

Sidebar: Make Reservations

"What are you making for dinner?" Every so often, even the best cooks like to answer: Reservations! These days, the way to make a reservation is to reserve time on the Web.

If you're craving a one-of-a-kind, hole-in-the-wall experience -- the sort of place that only locals know about -- visit Eric's Idiosyncratic Restaurant and Food Guide (www.mapville.com/riback/eats.htm). You'll find listings for joints in 22 states. The site has links to Roadway Express (www.roadway.com/offroad/diners.html), which offers listings of diners across the country.

CuisineNet (www.cuisinenet.com) relies on customers to rate eateries in approximately 16 cities. It offers a weekly food magazine called The Café and a monthly chat series.

Other sites are devoted to road warriors or on-the-road food lovers -- people who like to end a tough day away from home with a good meal. RestaurantRow (www.restaurantrow.com) contains more than 100,000 restaurant listings in nearly 7,000 cities in 47 different countries. If you see a restaurant you'd like to try, just let RestaurantRow know, and it will make a reservation for you.

SavvyDiner (www.savvydiner.com) provides a selection of restaurants that come highly recommended by the concierge staff of top hotels in many different cities. Savvy Diner will also make reservations for you -- and some restaurants will even set aside preferred seating for SavvyDiner devotees.

Sidebar: He Knows His Bites -- And Bytes

Bill Wallace certainly knows food. right After attending Brown University, he moved to San Francisco. He didn't start a high-tech company. He opened his first store -- a cheese shop that imported fine products from around the world. After he sold his business, he held a number of different food-related jobs, from working as a food writer for The Market Basket, a culinary magazine published by Mark Miller, the famous Santa Fe chef, to running his own farm-based restaurant.

Eventually, Wallace became culinary director for Draeger's, a well-known high-end food chain with many retail outlets throughout the San Francisco area. He also started the company's now-famous cooking-school programs and, until last year, was the director of Draeger's restaurant and largest stores.

These days, Wallace, now 51, is vice president, food at Tavolo (formerly Digital Chef). He still knows food -- but he also knows more than he ever thought he would about the Net. Recently, he spoke to Fast Company about what the Web really brings to the table.

How well do food and the Web mix?