Comments on: Still No Respect…

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:25:22 +0000

On the “ignore the criticism”, I don’t necessarily agree there. Not when the criticism is a large entity. That creates opportunity to further your brand/cause. Parker addressing the bloggers (and me) directly and criticizing is one thing, but doing it in a way that is clearly a maneuver to bolster his own position with his “peeps”, blatantly misrepresent while telling others they misrepresent, and flat out bullying a clearly smaller opponent (i.e trying to bully bloggers).

The opportunity that this creates is attention where we didn’t have attention before and a window to demonstrate what the community is and its value to the wine world.

What I’m saying is that when the highest of high profiles engages you like that you engage back (in a marketing sense) because you have exposure. While you have that exposure, what do you want to say?

I think every blogger should chime into this conversation because the topic has attention right now and begin to publicly discuss what he criticized about bloggers while it has the attention of the “Parker” crowd (which will be or is fleeting at best).

By: joel

joel — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:41:02 +0000

Sry about name typo. Using my iPhone. Great iPhone plugin BTW!!!

By: jorl

jorl — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:38:24 +0000

Have you ever seen the movie “King of Kong” (documentary)? If you haven’t you should. Parker reminds me of the main dude in that. Big deal in a small pond that is living in his own head.

Seriously, check that out. It’s how people not in the wine industry look at Parker.

By: ryan

ryan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:02:43 +0000

I’ve said for a long time that we as wine bloggers should talk less about the issues of wine blogging and get back to wine writing. If we write about wine educated and intelligent way we will earn the respect we need. Robert Parker after all is just a wine loving amateur who started publishing on the easiest and cheapest medium available when he started. If he were starting today he would be one of us.

Also I hate the bad bloggers=all bloggers are bad mentality. Wake up, we’re publishers, some who are better than others. Either way that statement is no different for “traditional press”, plenty of crap out there.

By: Dirty

Dirty — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 04:17:11 +0000

Michael,

Great point (you get zero respect unless you’ve earned it). I expect we’ll see zero response from WA.

The Wine Blogging community has a lot of stepping up to do- Not just in quality but more so in originality. (I’m needing improvements on both counts).

What proves legitimacy? I still think it is # of eyeballs first. If someone is doing great work and no one is paying attention it doesn’t really matter. (but if they are doing something great, it will get attention).

We’re down the road some, but still have a long long way to go.