This week’s featured site comes to us all the way from the UK, Wales to be exact. The Ashtray Blog is the official blog of ECigarette Direct, a Swansea based e-cigarette company.
Don’t be fooled by the fact this blog is run by an e-cigarette company. The Ashtray Blog has some of the best articles in the business, particularly in the realm of science and European politics. This site often features interviews with the researchers at the forefront of e-cigarette research.
Not only that, but James (one of the people behind the blog) is a pillar of the vaping blogger community. He always offers advice and encouragement to other bloggers including yours truly. Here’s what James had to say about his humble corner of the Interwebs:
We had a blog from close to the start of our company, but it wasn’t until 2009 that it started to took shape.
Back then we were starting to be hit by the first of a wave of rumours that e-cigarettes weren’t safe. I was worried, but a tobacco harm reduction researcher named Paul Bergen left a comment on the blog pointing out the incredibly potential for electronic cigarettes, and that opposition to it was based on anti-nicotine extremism and had little background in fact.
We asked Paul Bergen for an interview, and that was the first of a series of interviews with scientists discussing the safety and science of electronic cigarettes (you can read all the interviews here ).
It also prompted a lot of research into the science of e-cigarettes and also the opposition to it.
So now, our blog has several purposes:
to inform people about electronic cigarettes
to campaign for the continued legality of e-cigarettes
to highlight the links between a campaign against the e-cigarette and those whose financial interests are hurt by e-cigarettes
to entertain (we have fun with stunts like this one)
The blog is funded by ecigarettedirect.co.uk, and obviously there’s a commercial bent to it as well – but our aim is to produce more non-commercial content than commercial content.
I also take the point of view that we’ll only blog if there’s something worth saying, with the aim to produce occasional excellent content (sometimes it can take a couple of weeks to put a long post together) rather than regular but more mediocre content.
