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So, I’ve been away over the last week or so at a conference, and amongst the topics on discussion was, of course, Web 2.0.

Now, I’ve always been a little dubious – OK, all of the dubious – about the whole Web 2.0 moniker. (For anyone who’s not aware of what I’ve occasionally been known to refer to as “the Web 2.0 bollocks”, I recommend this summary). But one speaker at the conference, Sandeep Bakhshi, came up with the best description of Web 2.0 I’ve heard yet – " A system that gets better as people use it."

Another speaker there was Timo Vorensola, who directed the phenomenally popular and really cool Star Wreck: The Perkinning. It’s a feature film that he created by collaborating with literally thousands of people over the Internet, having them do everything from script suggestions to creating spaceships. (Virtual spaceships, I hasten to add.)

And all this got me thinking. What can things like that – massive collaboration, improvement through intelligent use of data and user feedback, The Interwebs – add to cooking?

I’ve already seen a little of what we could do from things like the TGWT competitions, in which a number of people work to develop dishes using ingredients that theoretically share aromatics and flavour compounds in common (and if you think that sounds wacky, I should point out that the Strawberry and Coriander foam that I won’t shut up about came from it), and from my experiment writing up the course of cooking a tasting menu, where the menu substantially changed as a result of suggestions from the people reading the writeup. But I’m sure there’s much more.

What about Open-Sourcing a menu, for example? Either a restaurant or an individual could take the Star Wreck approach, form a community or work within an existing one to develop an Open-Source tasting menu, or indeed entire restaurant menu. It’s not (quite) as insane as it sounds – after all, the Fat Duck has just published the recipes for its entire tasting menu of years past, so perhaps there’s less to fear from not keeping recipes secret than one might think. Have a forum, have people take tasks, small or large, whether that be sourcing the right place to get crockery, conducting controlled experiments to determine the perfect spice mix, or coming up with ideas for others to try. Then, just keep developing.

Or what about a Wikified recipe site? There are dozens of recipe sites on the Internet, but as far as I know none of them offer Wiki-like capability to edit and add tips for recipes. As a result, if you try a recipe, come up with a new tweak that improves it, and want to share that, it’s very hard to do so. Why not Wikify a recipe book?

Or what about live collaborative cooking? Forget Gordon Ramsay telling you what to do, why not set a time for a whole bunch of people to set up and cook the same thing, whilst running webcams, Twitter feeds, forums, whatever? Let people Flickr their progress, ask for advice, help out others if something’s gone wrong – a truly collaborative cooking experience. And then you can record the results so that the intelligence of the whole system remains available to anyone who wants to cook that dish in the future.

Cooking and technology still have a very uneasy relationship. Whilst most people think of Molecular Gastronomy as really cutting-edge, all it’s really doing is taking scientific principles and knowledge that’s 30, 50 or more years old, and applying it to cooking. What can we do if we seriously apply the lessons of the Internet age to cooking? How can we use the tastebuds of the whole system?