The Rotten Word

Introduction

The United States Federal Trade Commission recently released new rules governing disclosure with regard to endorsements and testimonials in advertising. These rules specifically refer to blogs, bloggers, blogging, and similar platforms. You can read them here (PDF).

I don’t make any money from this blog, and I don’t think I have ever been paid to say anything about anything, but, partly to be safe and partly to participate in the emerging conversation on disclosure, I’m adding the below notice to this site. It was generated by DisclosurePolicy.org and I have made some modifications. Another site that offers some help with providing such disclosure, particularly useful for individual pages or posts, is Cmp.ly, who offer easy-to-digest “single-serving” disclosures not unlike the Creative Commons licenses offered at http://creativecommons.org/choose/.

Policy

This policy is valid from 21 October 2009.

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me, Joe Ross. For questions about this blog, please contact me at Joe AT therottenword DOT com.

This blog does not accept any form of cash advertising, sponsorship, or paid topic insertions. However, I will and do occasionally accept and keep free products, services, travel, event tickets, and other forms of compensation from companies and organizations. When material related to these forms of compensation is posted on this blog, notice of that compensation will be explicit.

The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely those of the blog owner. If I claim or appear to be an expert on a certain topic or product or service area, I will only endorse products or services that I believe, based on my expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

The owner of this blog would like to disclose the following existing relationships. These are companies, organizations or individuals that may have a significant impact on the content of this blog. I have a financial interest in the following that are relevant to my blogging: Very minimal stock holdings in: Palm, Incorporated (PALM).

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org.