Mike: What you say about accepting gifts has been discussed on some other blogs in recent months. Jane on Horitcultural recently posted a policy for this. She states she will give away anything she gets, after posting about it if she wants to (good or bad). Personally, I would feel free to keep gifts of modest value.

If someone sent me something completely unsolicited and out of the blue, I would keep it and feel free to say or not say anything I wanted, good or bad. If someone contacted me in advance, and negotiated terms for giving me something, I would discuss it with them if I was interested.

The one thing that is key is I would be 100% honest about the circumstances under which I acquired something. I would also never agree in advance to promote or say something nice about a product, that I didn’t know anything about.

As far as comments go, I’m a little more flexible. Spam is spam, and I don’t tolerate that. On the other hand if someone writes a comment specifically for this blog, that is in some way related to the topic at hand and makes a promotion for a product, I would probably accept that.

What’s key to comments on blogs is they have a ‘nofollow’ directive, meaning search engines will ignore them for ranking purposes. If anyone posts a comment that tries to get around this directive (with a ‘rel nofollow’ statement), I will either refuse the comment or edit it appropriately. In this way it’s hard for anyone to promote their product very effectively by solely posting about it in blog comments.

But this is a very important subject to think about!

Thanks for that thoughtful full disclosure.

I went through pretty much the same process in considering ads on my site, and have a similar basic attitude towards advertising as you seem to. I’ve found no clear resolution, so I leave it for now to people to make up their own minds.

My purpose in blogging is to share, not advertise or “make money”, yet successful sharing results in a form of wealth that is earned much like cash. So the blog is not like a private, locked journal, there is an intention (if not a deliberate plan) to make it grow. I can “afford” the relatively small cost of publishing the blog as it is now. If the traffic rose significantly, so would the cost, and at some point it would become for me an “expense” that I would have to fund from some source. And so on…

It’s an insidious thing. What if a company sends me seeds or a garden tool to “try out”? Would I record it on the blog, thereby instantly providing editorial mention (the most valuable form of publicity for a company)? Even if I acknowledge that aspect in a post, it is still advertising favoring the company that made the deliberate effort to promote. I will be using any trust I may have earned to promote something completely apart from my own experience. Do I even “like” that company, let alone want to endorse it? And how do I treat borderline comment spam (as just happened to me for the first time): do I remove any comment that refers to the commenter’s own products or services (in this case, I made a judgement call, commented on the the comment, and left it). Phew…

Each tiny step one takes from contemplating literally the seeds in the soil, including blogging about it, the complications of dealing with the larger reality multiply. I’m trying to figure it out as I go…