The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments, the Associated Press reported Sunday.
This would, for the first time, bring bloggers under FTC guidelines that ban deceptive or unfair business practices.
"New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers--as well as the companies that compensate them--for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest," the article explained.
The rules could be quite strict, even extending to the practice of affiliate links--for example, a music blogger who links to a song on Amazon MP3 or iTunes that earns an affiliate commission in the process.
The practice of free products for bloggers, most of whom are not bound by ethical guidelines that journalists have historically followed, has been making headlines for some time now. Microsoft, for example, created a wave of bad press a few years ago when it gave free Acer laptops preloaded with Windows Vista to several dozen bloggers.
Some companies have sprung up around the whole notion of blogger compensation and giveaways. The AP article mentions some of the marketing companies that have made a business out of offering bloggers incentives--free trips, products, gift certificates, or outright payments--for coverage. One of them, Izea, has been generating controversy in the tech press since it started PayPerPost.
Izea says that it requires bloggers to disclose what they've gotten paid for or what they've received for free. But with the proposed FTC guidelines, if a blogger fails to disclose a freebie or payment, both Izea and the blogger could be held responsible. The FTC could also take issue with the fact that for at least one promotion, Izea has said it avoided including bloggers who would be likely to give the company negative press.
Izea CEO Ted Murphy wrote in a blog post Monday that the company supports stricter FTC regulations for bloggers.
"The companies that should be worried about these changes are those that have no standards and no way to enforce disclosure," Murphy wrote. "We have invested millions of dollars creating systems that allow us to automate transactions and verify standardized disclosure."
But some bloggers, the AP article mentioned, are concerned that the FTC's efforts could go too far, possibly generating probes into posts that were written without any compensation, and possibly leading bloggers to post with more restraint. And some believe it would be better if bloggers created their own standards based on niche and industry.
Then there's this: does the FTC realize just how many small-time bloggers are out there? Championing business ethics is a worthy goal, but, um, good luck getting much done when there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there and new ones popping up more or less daily. Ever heard of the expression "herding cats?"
This post was updated at 11:37 a.m. PT with comment from Izea.
Last month Google released a less complicated way of linking up your phone with one or more of your Blogger blogs as part of its Blogger in Draft program. It put the settings to post to a specific blog through your phone or e-mail next to each blog's title inside of the dashboard using small and simple icons. And as of today the change is now live to everyone.
The most important part of this seemingly minor update is that it takes two sets of settings that were previously tucked away and puts them front and center. Posting via SMS or MMS message can be set up in about 30 seconds if you have your phone handy, and you don't even have to leave the dashboard to do it. The same goes for creating a special e-mail address to post to each blog--something which was also, previously hidden away from non-savvy users.
While sending a post to Blogger through your phone is nothing new, Google clearly wants to make the process a little easier. Putting the icons and setup tools right there in front of you is a good start. The one big caveat that remains is that posting through SMS still only works in the US, so if you're a Blogger user from another country you're stuck having to use your phone's e-mail app--meaning you need a data plan.
There's also the continuing matter of a lack of an official, native Blogger application for mobile phones. WordPress and MovableType have had free mobile applications out for some time now--including some snazzy ones for the iPhone. These make it simple to work on and post entries locally, as well as edit and moderate posts while on the go. SMS and e-mail are nice, but at this point in the game a dedicated application would be a nice touch. Those with an iPhone and who are willing to part with $3 can have it with this app called BlogPress which also posts to WordPress, TypePad, Live Journal and others.
Here's the original demo on how to post from your phone from last October:
Teens in Tech, a blogging network that's written by young adults, announced Friday that it has acquired Youth Bloggers Network for an undisclosed sum. According to a post on the Youth Bloggers Network blog, both companies "decided that by joining forces, our projects could help each other vastly." Going forward, the combined company wants to create unique Wordpress themes, e-books, coupons, and a variety of community features "to slowly transform Youth Bloggers Network into a social network for young and teen bloggers."
Kardia Health Systems, a company that was formed to commercialize the Echocardiography Information Management System from the Mayo Clinic, will launch an online reporting system for vascular laboratories this weekend. The Web-based platform will allow doctors to communicate with patients and other practitioners over the Web detailing a patient's vascular information and past procedures. The company claims users will be able to focus more on patient services by deploying the platform.
GetJar, an independent mobile app store, announced Friday that it has topped 400 million mobile app downloads since its launch in 2004. Over the past month alone, it has witnessed a 200 percent increase in downloads over the same period in 2008. The company claims that based on its download figures, its app store's popularity is second only to the Apple App Store. GetJar's store provides apps for over 1,300 different handsets.
ConnectedVentures, owner of online comedy site CollegeHumor, has acquired sports satire site SportsPickle, the company announced Thursday. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and there is currently no word on whether SportsPickle will remain a separate entity or be rolled into CollegeHumor.
Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.
There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.
Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with the situation. It released a collection of libraries and scripts, written in the Python language, that converts between the export formats of LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, and Google's own Blogger service, said J.J. Lueck of the team in a blog posting about the Blog Converters project.
That means that a person could convert an exported file into a format another blog system comprehends, permitting the data to be imported into the new system. That could make it easier for a person to move to Google's own service--but also to move off it.
Of course, you'll have to be proficient in running Python scripts to use the technology. But it could get easier soon: Google said the scripts can be hosted on Google App Engine, its service for running Web-based applications written in Python, so perhaps somebody will set up some tools to make blog migration easier for the non-programmers out there.
Future versions of the technology will support the BlogML data format and a mechanism to synchronize blogs with services that have an API (application programming interface) for accessing data but not import-export abilities.
Google added an import-export feature to Blogger in December. The company's "don't be evil" slogan got its start in a discussion about the company's commitment not to lock up people's data such as e-mail archives.
Girly blog company Sugar Inc. has announced a new affiliate marketing program for bloggers, based on ShopStyle, the social-shopping and product-search site that it acquired last year. It's called ShopSense.
Here's how it works: if style, culture, or shopping bloggers write about a given product that's in the ShopStyle directory, they can add a ShopStyle widget so that readers can actually buy the product or can use the ShopStyle API to further customize the app. The blogger gets a cut of the revenue.
Sugar started as a content company, with an inaugural celebrity gossip brand called PopSugar, but has recently expanded significantly into services for other bloggers--furthering the comparisons with Glam Media, the ad network and blogger services company that started with fashion and celebrity news sites but has since moved into more diverse cultural niches.
Sugar recently started allowing bloggers to use its own platform, OnSugar but has said that the affiliate program is open to anyone regardless of how they host their blogs. It is, however, directly integrated into OnSugar.
"Given the current state of the economy, and with the holiday season fast approaching, we are excited to open up a new revenue stream for fashion bloggers and developers alike," said Sugar vice president Andy Moss, who's in charge of ShopStyle. "With ShopStyle's breadth of products and beautiful images, ShopSense has the ability to provide significant income for its participants."
One snag: Given the current state of the economy, is anybody going to cough up the cash for that pair of Louboutin heels?
Facebook likes to trumpet the value of "trusted referrals"--recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.
Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.
That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.
Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of "blog readers" say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on "familiar" or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.
So what does all this mean? Well, it's good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of "appvertising" and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.
That's actually really surprising--or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don't even know they're reading them.
BuzzLogic, a start-up that , has pushed its ad network out of beta to a full release.
The "Conversation Ad Network" debuted in beta mode in June and uses BuzzLogic's influence-tracking technology as a way to draw in both advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers are promised access to the most influential bloggers in their niches, and bloggers with that influence are offered more lucrative deals.
Prior to launching the ad network, BuzzLogic purchased ActiveWeave, manufacturer of browser plug-in BlogRovr, to shape it into a tool for clients. Then, during its beta period, the BuzzLogic network enticed bloggers to join by offering them guaranteed $2 CPM (clicks per thousand impressions) ad rates.
"We've seen a strong correlation between campaign effectiveness and the quality blogs our technology is able to surface since launching our targeting platform last year--now we're expanding our targeting approach to our own network of sites," BuzzLogic CEO Rob Crumpler said in a release. "In this fragmented media environment, it has become clear that a popular site isn't necessarily influential when it comes to niche subject areas. Many lesser-known blogs have the capability to deliver great advertising results, they're just not getting paid for it."
There are seemingly zillions of ad networks out there, but BuzzLogic's technology for niche influence targeting gives it a leg up. The company said that over 500 sites have already joined the network in its beta phase.
Follow that blog!
(Credit: Google)With blog platforms Movable Type and WordPress adding social-networking features to their software, it was only a matter of time before Google's Blogger did the same.
A post on the official Blogger blog earlier this week announced that users would soon be able to display their "followers"--other Blogger members who have subscribed to them.
The optional feature--along with a notification on blog owners' "dashboards" of how many people have subscribed to their blogs through Blogger--will be rolled out in the next few weeks. A new tab on the dashboard, called "Blogs I'm Following," lets Blogger users keep track of updates to the blogs on their subscription list.
The problem with these sorts of features is that they're inherently limited to readers whose "following" is directly tied to the Blogger software and its members, so it will reflect only a slice of readers. A follower widget (or gadget, as Google calls them) claiming 21 followers only refers to Blogger members, not to the overall number of people reading the blog, which could make the owners of smaller blogs get a bit image-conscious.
But with its Google ownership, Blogger is tying the new following feature into some of its other properties, like Google Reader and the forthcoming Google Friend Connect. The "Blogs I'm Following" tab, for example, can be imported into Google Reader.
So you liked that blog post you just read--why don't you toss the writer a buck or two?
That's the rationale behind new-media outlet Salon's latest initiative. Members of its "Open Salon" user-generated content community can now "tip" one another with real-world money if they like what they see. You know, like street musicians. Popular content will also appear on the main Salon.com homepage.
Plenty of sites have instituted virtual reputation gauges (i.e. Yelp's "compliments") and a handful of amateur-content-driven media sites like GroundReport give their contributors a cut of ad revenue, but having members compensate one another is a pretty novel concept.
Salon's micropayments are handled through technology from Revolution MoneyExchange, a member of the Revolution corporation founded by former AOL czar Steve Case. Each Open Salon member who registers for Revolution MoneyExchange is given a complimentary $10 with which to start rewarding other bloggers for their stories, images, and videos uploaded to the site. But those would-be recipients can only accept the compensation if they've registered for MoneyExchange accounts themselves.
"Open Salon eliminates the gatekeepers," editor-in-chief Joan Walsh said in a statement. "It makes our smart, creative audience full partners in Salon's publishing future."
Will it work? Sure, while that free $10 is still available. After that, it's less certain. If the results of Radiohead's pay-what-you-want In Rainbows album are any indicator, Web users tend to cough up the cash when they have to and take content for free when it's possible. But on the flip side, there are plenty of people willing to pay for virtual "gifts" in Facebook, not to mention shelling out alarming amounts of real money for the in role-playing games.
And the highbrow, left-leaning Salon is a pretty civilized environment in which to institute this kind of system. If "tipping" were added to a more rabble-friendly site like Digg, well, that might spell chaos.
But the idea of this might make me inclined to write something of decent quality for Open Salon and see if I get some pizza money in return. Especially if I knew that Bill Gates were reading, or something.
Google announced on Friday the release of a number of updates to its Blogger publishing platform--well, sort of. The updates have gone into Blogger in Draft, the service's beta platform, with the expectation that they'll eventually become full features.
The updates will seem a bit humdrum for people who don't use Blogger, but for those who do, it's a set of important baby steps toward shaping the service to fit customer feedback. That's especially important for Google, as this is one niche of the Web where Mountain View doesn't have a huge lead: there is tough competition in the blog-publishing market, especially from the likes of WordPress and Six Apart.
Blogger users who want to be on the cutting edge will now be able to set their default "dashboard" to Blogger in Draft, and have the Blogger in Draft blog bookmarked as an easy reference. There's tighter integration of Google Gadgets, as well as a number of minor fixes to a recently redesigned dashboard.
But the "by popular demand" features are likely to gather more interest: five-star rating options on posts, much like those of Pownce; a revised post editor interface; support for Google Account logins and OpenID in comments; and perhaps most importantly, the ability to back up blog posts on a computer or export them to another blog.
