Upfront Dept.

Some of you have probably heard about the recent brouhaha about the FTC possibly cracking down on bloggers who receive freebies unless they provide full disclosure of their connections with advertisers. The whole thing is still very muddy, and an earlier interview with an FTC fellow and some recent news have clarified little or nothing. The rules take effect December 1, so a lot of people are still running around wondering what this all means.

In my case, starting immediately, I've decided to tag all reviews done for this site if I received a copy of the item in question for review. (Random example. Disclosure label is at bottom.) I decided it was easy enough to do this for the sake of fairness; I don't feel obliged to automatically say good things about everything sent to me for a review. Note that reviews filed before Oct. 1 may not have disclosure labels, but if you're curious about whether or not I got a review copy of a given item, ask; I won't hesitate to reply.

Note that all the reviews I did for AMN (or at least the vast, vast majority of them) automatically fall into this category. My listings of those reviewed here are simply for the sake of convenience.

UPDATE: It looks like the FTC has clarified the rules a great deal, according to this post. The short version is that unless you're part of an actual marketing program you're not required to disclose anything. Given that I have affiliate links back to Amazon for the products I look at, which falls into that category, it makes sense for me to provide full disclosure.