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Boing Boing, the world’s biggest blog according to Technorati, have a special section sponsored by Honda. On the face of it, it seems an ideal match-up – BoingBoing is a self-professed “directory of wonderful things”, and as a celebration of the bold, the quirky and the creative, it meshes well with Honda’s “power of dreams” brand message, and high-art fantastical advertising (latest example of which you can see here).

Still, at the same time, BoingBoing has decidedly indie creds, and the blog has taken a strong line criticising coprporations, governments and other organisations in the past for hypocrisy or damaging campaigns. No surprise then, that some regular readers felt uncomfortable, particularly when it came down to Honda’s sponsorship covering BoingBoing’s environmental section, as some of their commenters have noted:

WTF? Honda, fossil fuel burners par excellence sponsoring the environment? Just cause they build one car that is a bit less polluting, hardly makes it a green company. Global warming and oil wars anyone? What makes it green is ‘hip’ places like BB who are willing to peddle their propaganda.

Perhaps BB weren’t clear enough about what the sponsorship entailed – readers were worried that this may compromise their editorial independence or that BB were going to tailor content to Honda’s demands. Mark Frauenfelder, one of the contributors, set the record straight with this comment:

Honda gave Boing Boing no guidelines. Boing Boing’s editors have not corresponded with Honda about the campaign. Honda asked Boing Boing’s ad sales partner (Federated Media) to ask Boing Boing’s editors (Cory, David, Xeni, and me) to tag posts that fit the categories of “safety,” “innovation,” and “environment.”

But the fears pervade, as this poster summarised the issues it raises:

I have NO problem with BiongBoing making money. I saw the Honda ads earlier and I supported the attention that a new big name sponsor would garner. Egads, with all the work that they’ve done for the anti-DRM movement and for general nuttiness in general, I salute them. And, to an extent, I find that the explicit disclosure of the sponsored sections forthright. However, these sponsored sections, in my mind and IMHO, start to converge with the content I value. This troubles me.

One of the reasons why many blogs and other social media are so influential (and why we like working with them so much) is that they’re a credible source, but to many that credibility can come into question the moment they do anything with a commercial enterprise. In this case, it was nothing more than a simple sponsorship deal, and given BoingBoing runs ads already, there is no real compromise of their values or editorial stance. But they didn’t quite communicate this in the initial post, which has led to uncertainty and doubt. You can never please everyone, of course, but being as transparent as possible about these things is key to making sure your audience isn’t unnecessarily alienated.