I am interested in the EWBC because my colleagues and I are studying wine blogs and I have very little experience either with blogging or bloggers. This seemed a good way to find out what is important to bloggers.

I am a professor of international business. I have long been interested in how people interact across national and cultural boundaries (my training is in sociology rather than business). One of my colleagues and I decided to study blogs as a new and poorly understood form of communication in both the private and commercial sectors. At first we were looking at all types of blogs but it became clear that the blog communities in different fields had quite different dynamics. We settled on wine blogs because we both like wine and it seemed a very coherent sphere to investigate. That coherence has proven to be somewhat illusory. Since then we have added two marketing professors to our team, one of whom has written on wine marketing.

I tend to read blogs that are chatty and informal rather than those which adopt a condescending or patronizing tone.

The question of what makes a good blog is a central one for our research. We have set up our own blog, Wine Blog Research, to gather opinions on this topic. I suspect that what constitutes a good blog will differ depending on the characteristics of the bloggers and the topic of the blog. For myself I prefer blogs which are informal, information-rich and positive rather than confrontational.

In ten years wine blogs will be even more common and accepted. I suspect that they will have become more formalized and more commercial. I also suspect that much of the counter-culture element that one sees now will have migrated to some other forum.

I am attending EWBC to meet with bloggers and to try to understand both what they do and why they do it. In my research I always have enjoyed simply talking to people as a means of collecting data and guiding my research. This seemed liked a good opportunity to do both.