My Italian colleague Franco Ziliani, author of the entertainingly irascible Vino al Vino blog (at www.vinoalvino.org), recently contacted me with some questions for an article he is preparing about wineblogs. Since some of the questions and answers might be of more general interest, I reproduce a few here. By the way, I welcome any suggestions as to how this site, or this blog, might be improved.

There are further sections planned for the site (an appreciative section on Shakespeare, and a vastly partial, personal and unreliable Encyclopedia) and I am constantly trying to find time to upload more tasting notes and articles. I could post more on the blog, too, on political topics … but maybe it would be more fun to describe ordinary scenes of British life? Anyway, feel free to ask.

How, why and when did you launch your blog, and with what goals?

My website was launched in 2006, and the blog section began in spring 2007. My aims were:

• to have fun
• to post material that I couldn’t put up anywhere else – either because it was out of the normal area in which people ask me to work (politics, ethics, philosophy – and I hope to extend it into other fields later), or because it doesn’t fit the grid of what conventional print publishing in the wine, food and travel worlds seems to want
• to be provocative where appropriate
• to provide a place where those who might enjoy my books, magazine and radio work can join in a conversation with me on mutually interesting topics, or even raise important topics of their own
• eventually (a future goal) to expand my own writing range in unusual and more creative areas – a kind of artblog, if you like
• to bypass the dead end which wine-book publishing and wine journalism seems to be sliding into.

In what ways are blogs innovative?
They are innovative in their immediacy, their intimacy and the annihilation of all geographical boundaries (and many linguistic ones, given that English works as a kind of Web Esperanto). Democratisation and freedom of information, too, are an innovation for those blogs (like mine) which have no subscription element. The downside is a certain amount of unreliability and often poor editorial and literary standards.

What is the relationship between established media and blogs? Are blogs complementary or alternative?
I think they are mostly complementary at the moment. Ten years down the line, it may be different. Established media milk the blogosphere for profit with their website spinoffs. The amount of advertising on some magazine-linked wine websites and blogs makes them (for me) totally unreadable and unusable, as well as ethically questionable. There are other, ‘purer’ websites created by people who are passionately keen on the subject, who have a ‘day job’ (therefore no income requirement from a site) and who are good at computing (and can therefore do all the technical stuff themselves), but which aren’t necessarily any more interesting than run-of-the-mill wine journalism because of a lack of writing ability, contacts and exposure. Bulletin boards are hugely popular but intrinsically ephemeral – as dinner-table chat is. I think, therefore, that we don’t yet have great new content screaming out to be archived from people of real insight, understanding and communicative ability exclusively available on line.

Why the success of blogs?
Because the world has changed. But I wouldn’t overstate the success, yet. As I say, most of the headline success is just well-established players invading the blogosphere and using it as a new profit model and databank. There’s a sizeable element of vanity publishing and nerdism, too, which statistically will have little impact other than as an amorphous whole.

Why does the conventional media distrust blogs?
Well, no competitive business ever wants to promote its rivals. But in general, I haven’t found a lot of distrust or misunderstanding; I just think the whole thing is still in its infancy, and everyone understands that. But the day you get into a train and see more people reading text from screens which are linked to the internet than reading newspapers, magazines or books, then the balance of power will have shifted for good, and the Gutenberg era will … well, not be over, but be beginning an entirely new chapter.