FTC Guns for Blogger Shills—and Misses

Blogger payola is risible, but the new FTC guidelines are misguided, unenforceable, and utterly useless.

by Dan Costa

The FTC released guidelines designed to crackdown on the blogger payola—the risible practice of paying people to write favorable things about your products or company. As the editor who runs the Reviews team here at PCMag.com, I thought it would be worth my time to wade through the 81-page guide of regulations. After all, the penalty could be $11,000 per violation. Near as I can tell, the regulation will require every blogger to disclose payments, gifts, and professional interests for every tweet, post, or email that supports a given company. In other words, this mess of regulations misunderstands media, creates unenforceable rules, and, quite possibly, violates our First Amendment right to free speech.

For starters, let me review how PCMag.com does business. Vendors loan us products to review. We test them. We send them back. That's pretty much it. Staff can't take cash or gifts of value from vendors—although you will be hard-pressed to find a staffer without at least a dozen 512MB USB keys filled with press releases and images. There is also a drawer full of T-shirts. Our advertising department has no say in what we write and neither do vendors. Sometimes companies are upset about what we write, but they know the deal going in.

PCMag has been in business for longer than I have, and I take lot of pride in working here. Truth be told, many of our competitors also have rigorous editorial standards. A lot of established blogs have standards that are just as high. For that matter, I know individual bloggers who are informed, scrupulous, and utterly enjoyable to read. So why is the FTC setting up different types of rules for PCMag, or indeed, why is it setting up rules at all?

The new rules extend far beyond bloggers. Facebook updates, Twitter posts, Tumblr photos, even word-of-mouth marketing can be now be regulated by the FTC. Like most people, I despise this type of covert marketing more than anything. But, at some point, I think we have to let people post, blog, tweet, and say what they want to one another. We can decide whether or not to believe them.

Read the rest of the article here.



Anti Spam

This is a continuation of a previous tag that I had received. I have also been tagged by Christy and Aadil.

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Dear MyOpera Team,
I am writing to you today because I have some issues that I would like for you to fix quickly. First off, some friends of mine have recently been upset by asinine members of this site leaving them inappropriate comments and/or messages. One person even blocked the member that was upsetting them, but that person was STILL able to get onto my friend's page and leave a really inappropriate comment on one of their pictures in the photo album They were able to do this because that a$$hole had added my friend to his friend's list. Now what kind of crap is that? If you block a person, they should be BLOCKED and unable to comment and message the member that blocked them!

Second, you need to change the way that adding friends is being done. It needs to be done like Yahoo IM, Myspace, and others do it; you have to approve a person's request before they can add you to their friends list! Some people have added me to their friends list that I want nothing to do with because of the content of their pages, and comments that they have left on people's blogs. I would greatly appreciate a "friends request" system like seen on other sites, as would many other members of this community.

Third, There is currently no way for me to edit my friends list. I have tried to make changes to it and the "Edit Friends" option is now MIA. Where did it go? Please return it very soon.

Fourth, on a recent post I tried to upload a song to the post and the song seemingly uploaded to this site. When I tried to put it on my blog post, it wasn't there. I tried to delete it and upload it again and got the same results. Only now, I have 2 of the same song file in my Files folder and can't delete either one

Fifth, whenever I type a message into my Shoutbox, I don't need a message in my Inbox that says, "FXM256 posted a message in your shoutbox!" I already know that, duhhh!

I must say that I enjoy this community and feel quite at home here. I have had the pleasure of meeting some wonderful people from around the world, and some have become good friends Please fix the issues that I've outlined very soon and MyOpera will be an even more enjoyable place for all of us

Sincerly,
Marcus


Anti Spam

I took this quiz on Sarah's blog. She got a Sniper as a career while I got:

Link: The Fun Way to Pick a Career Test written by harpoleers2 on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Anti Spam

Some recent news concerning George Bush & Tony Blair that Americans and Britons should see. Take a look at this post from Dillon to learn more about it.

Also take a look at this article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) about legislation the Bush Administration is trying to sneak through Congress that protects the government and the telephone companies participating in the illegal domestic spying program from lawsuits by giving them immunity from lawsuits, and also strip away privacy safeguards.