“Will a set of standards give advertisers confidence in wine blogs?”

Standards and “Codes of Conduct” are much debated in the blogosphere. Can a set of standards be agreed upon, and what might they look like in the world of wine? Would they make a difference? Would anyone care?

We believe that standards would increase the confidence that readers and advertisers would have in the blogging medium, and by working to improve these, we would increase the opportunity for blogs to be taken seriously as sources of information, and as potential advertising media.

Why does this matter? Although many bloggers will continue to blog for the love of it, there are also those who want to take it to the next level and find ways to do this professionally - and even those of us who do not aim to be professional bloggers have certain costs to cover.

BUT … are we selling our souls? Does carrying advertising automatically discredit a blog? Should bloggers be free to do and say whatever they want without having to conform to a set of rules?

This is a contentious topic that will probably continue over lunch (that is why we propose to have it before lunch). What do you think? Can any general rules actually be written and put in place?

Dear Robert and Ryan,

living in the online wine publishing since 2000, I think that the business model / monetizazion, is one of the most relevant topics of the conference. How to monetize the time spent in wine blogging ?

I think that one blog, alone, can’t make moneys because of the small bergaining power that each one has individually. The things change if you pur a lot of bloggers togheter, but it is not enough. You need to have power and influence in the wine sector, you need some top publishers for each country you’re going to involve in the network and you need to cover a big part of the long tail.

Following this philosofhy, and relying on the experience matured in the online wine publishing and in the online advertising, I have created a wine & food advertising network wich works as a collector for all websites and bloggers that have as the specific topic wine and/or food.

This project - http://www.vinoclic.it - starts in Italy but now I’m working hard for expanding it in Europe and USA because I think that higher is the number of countries involved, higher is the opportunity to attract advertisers from different countries wich look to reach different countries but similar targets.

Today we’ve almost fifty wine & food related websites & blogs and we plan to increase the number of publishers in a short time, taking from the european and north america area. In this way we can talk to advertisers and media agencies as a single professional referent on an equal power.

VinoClic - this is the name of the adv network - has given ethical rules to be respected. The important thing, infact, is to add advertising on blogs preserving the integrity of each blogger who join the network. Here you can read some of the most relevant rules and rights that every publisher must agree before joining the network.

- each publisher should not mix advertising and content

- each publisher should not talk about an advertiser in a complacent way

- each publisher has to strives in giving a correct and gennuine information to readers

- each publisher has the power to ask vinoclic that a certain campaign should not appear on his/her blog

- vinoclic must work hard to choose only high quality sponsors

- vinoclic shouldn’t sell payed posts.

I think that EWBC 2008 will be a great moment to present this project and to answer a lot of questions.

Bye, Fil
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My detailed profile :
http://www.vinix.it/detail.php?ID=25016