Sunday, June 28, 2009

Justice At Last?

Newspapers recently have reported that the FTC plans late this summer to begin requiring bloggers and websites to identify all entries which have been written for compensation - i.e. by covert shills.

A typical newspaper article pointing this out is the following: http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-blogging-0622,0,1923444.story.

The proposed FTC guidelines may be viewed at http://www.ftc.gov/os/2008/11/P034520endorsementguides.pdf




My worry is that, if such regs are enforced, Amazon.com stars such as Harriet Klausner and Grady Harp may lose their inspiration to keep on publishing endless streams of ill-written, meaningless reviews, thus depriving us all of unparalled sources of merriment.

3 comments:

Malleus said...

Horribile dictu! I hope the effort fails -- or, at least, an exception is made for a few top entertainers, beginning of course with Our Lady of Fauxreview, Harriet Klausner, Amazon No.1 Top Reviewer.

Malleus said...

Stanely, the links appear bad -- I get "page not found", in both cases. Could you please double check ?

Malleus said...

Never mind, I fixed it. Interesting articles, thanks for finding them.