The regulations seem to address the issue of disclosure: if I give you a copy of my book and you write about it, you have to let your readers know that. If I buy you dinner and then you write about my book or reference my site, you have to disclose that. And so on, and so on.

Problem is, this FTC guideline has gotten more and more onerous in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, and bloggers are getting a bit paranoid about the implications.

Luckily, it appears that this paranoia is misplaced, so you can all take a deep breath. Earlier this week – Oct 14th, 2009 – Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, had a conference call with reporters to clarify the situation and here’s what she said:

“We’re not going to be patrolling the blogosphere, we are not planning on investigating individual bloggers.”

Engle emphasized that what they’ve released are new guidelines. “They aren’t rules and regulations, and they don’t have the force of law. They are guidelines intended to help advertisers comply with Section 5 of the FTC Act [PDF]” which focuses on unfair or deceptive practices.

So it’s not the rebirth of the Blog Police as the Disclosure Police, as I tweeted earlier while listening to a panel on this subject here at Blogworld, but it is nonetheless a reminder that you should still be transparent anyway. If a vendor pays $200 to write about their product, don’t run away in terror, just let your readers know.

And that’s what this brouhaha is all about anyway: just be transparent and disclose what’s going on, and you’ll be in the clear from both the FTC and ethically on the right side of things too.

Comments

While the idea of being able to build a social network is certainly not new (Ning has found some considerable success here) the ability to do it around existing WordPress sites certainly deserves notice. With millions of blogs and sites using WordPress the impact could be significant.
Matt Mullenweg of Automattic lays it out in his blog saying

“There’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web. I don’t think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks… but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework.”

Pretty smart approach considering that while there are a lot of social networks there are more to come as users get more sophisticated and want more opportunity. With the existing user base for WordPress the opportunity exists to make a substantial impact in the marketplace in short order.

This latest addition follows other purchases by Automattic which includes PollDaddy. That, coupled with $30 million in investment, makes Automattic a real force. Mullenweg continues in his blog saying

In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.

While building a social network is not quite as easy as “if you build it they will come” having a tool like this could move the idea along in many peoples’ minds more quickly than they might have imagined.

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