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Friday, October 30, 2009

Blogs and Advertising

Airplane

The FTC has been studying the relationship between blogging and advertising for some time and just a couple of weeks ago published their "Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials". The FTC really has their hands full trying to deal with the scammers and spammers out there -- unfortunately, there are a large number of people out there who want to invade our privacy and bombard us with advertising, much of it fraudulent. The focus of this latest announcement is on the not so subtle cases where bloggers conceal their relationships.

When I started blogging in 1998, my postings were what I called "reflections" -- experiences or opinions in various hobby areas. I would say most postings back then were from bloggers who were sharing information on technical topics. What later emerged was a group of bloggers who were experts on specific products or services. We all know people who seem to know much more than average about photography or how to use Netflix or whatever. Companies mostly ignored blogging in the early years but eventually they figured out that some of the bloggers were actually subject matter experts and equally important they were "influencers". People may not trust the company web site about XYZ digital cameras but they completely trusted "Phil's Photography Blog". This lead to companies paying close attention to these expert blogs and providing them with lots of information to insure the blogger had the facts. Then companies began to see the blogs as an advertising opportunity and they would put ads on the blogger site and pay the blogger for showing the ads.

Paid ads lead to paid fees or stipends to help support the blogger. Cynics might say that as the bloggers came to be dependent on this new source of income they may have lost their objectivity and independence. Perhaps their product reviews were no longer unbiased? That is the focus of the FTC -- extreme cases where there is significant money flowing but no disclosure by either the company or the blogger.

Disclosure is a good thing. For many businesses, the imposition of Sarbanes-Oxley and the associated disclosures that are required has become quite a burden in time, effort, and cost. For a blogger, however, disclosure is easy. When I started patrickWeb back in 1995 I added a disclosure page about the web site with a visible link on the home page. I updated it from time to time, most recently in 2005. The patrickWeb disclosure page describes my key affiliations, information policy, and privacy policy.

Blogging, People, Public Policy, patrickWeb October 30, 2009 01:36 PM

Friday, June 19, 2009

Busy Week

Wired Business Conference in New York City. On Tuesday it was down to Dulles Airport and a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum nearby. Wednesday was the closing session of the Special Libraries Association where I served on a panel moderated by Judy Woodruff. Today included a series of meetings at Danbury Hospital and a great demo of their new electronic record-keeping system. When I got home there was a small brown box on the front stoop containing an Apple iPhone 3GS. More on all these topics over the next few days.

Add category, Conferences, People June 19, 2009 07:03 PM

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Net Attitude

Net Attitude has reached a new status - the entire book is now available to read for free here on patrickWeb. This is something I have wanted to offer for a long time but in the prior years my publisher would not allow it. I believe studies have shown that books that are made free to read on the Internet actually get incremental sales -- sales of the book that would not otherwise have happened. Perhaps the protective attitude (lack of Net Attitude) of publishers is why they are in the soup.

I wrote Net Attitude during the summer of 2001 and it was published in November of that year. The timing was not good as at that point business, management, and technology books were not selling much for obvious reasons. However, the book was published both in the U.S. and also outside the U.S. in Chinese, Italian, and UK English. After roughly 30,000 copies, the book sold out, althought there are some new copies floating around and selling on Amazon. There is also a version available for the Kindle and now the new version right here on patrickWeb. My thanks to Andy Grachuk at JingotheCat Web Design for creating the Web compilation.

2001 was a long time ago but not as long ago as 1994 when Tom Brokaw appeared on " Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" to talk about "Early Reports About the Internet". I was in Las Vegas at the conference that Brokaw refers to and the camera caught me with a few comments (see video). Bill Gates got most of the attention, understandably, but it is sad to hear that Brokaw called Gates one of the "founding geniuses of this new technology". That same year both Bill Gates and I gave presentations at an IDG conference in Paris. Gates said the Internet was too slow and too insecure to be used for business. Needless to say, my speech represented the opposite point of view and was in the same camp as Eric Schmidt (then at Sun) who said that every business, large or small, will be on the Internet.

Thanks to Julie Moran Alterio,Technology and business reporter at The Journal News for telling me about the Brokaw video. She called it "A blast from your past".

Internet Technology, Net Attitude, People June 14, 2009 09:31 PM