Dot Com, Dot Org, Dot FOOD?

Wouldn't it be great if, when you're surfing the net to find out about a new restaurant, a site's Web address could give you a clue of whether or not the food is actually any good? Although you still need to search through reviews for that type of detail, a step was made in the right direction this week with the announcement of the creation of the .FOOD top-level domain.

The announcement was made by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck in Sydney, Australia, at the ICANN Conference (short for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). All his acclaimed restaurants — like Spago, Postrio and Chinois — will soon have .FOOD addresses, so they'll stand apart from any old dot com on the net.

Even better, a percentage of the revenue from .FOOD will go to food related charities, like Meals on Wheels and the Culinary Institute of America's scholarship program.

To create .FOOD, Puck worked with the internet company Minds + Machines, which has also helped create domains like .ECO. If at some point that world of web addresses really expands, we call first dibs on the address drinkup@tonicand.gin.