Galleycat:  An “associate director for advertising practices at the Federal Trade Commission met with attendees of the 2009 Kidlitosphere Conference to discuss the FTC’s new guidelines for commercial endorsement and how they’ll affect book bloggers when they go into effect on December 1. . . . Mary Engle made . . . what the blog Galleysmith described as ‘a distinction between independent reviewers (that would be us book bloggers y’all) and participants of marketing programs.’ The report goes on to say that “

Books Blog:  “If you get a free book, and don’t disclose this ‘vested interest’ if you blog about it, you are now liable to five-figure fines.  Does this make any kind of sense to anybody?”

The Digital Media Lawyer Blog:  “A dominant theme at this week’s Digital Hollywood conference is the tension between the need to for truly targeted advertising to online audiences and an individual’s right to privacy. The Internet creates the ability for businesses to gather a marketer’s dream world of data about their customers. This can include identification data (name, address, phone number, email address), demographic data (age, gender, marital status, sexual orientation), financial data (bank and credit card account data), and behavioral data (browsing history, downloading history) and much, much more. If this type of data falls into the wrong hands, it can subject the customer or identify fraud. But even many purely commercial uses can cause embarrassment or harm to the consumer.”

DailyKos.com:  “The more I read this interview of an FTC staffer by book blogger Edward Champion, the more the stupidity burns.”

Wall St. Journal:  “There’s a saying that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. We’ve now learned that bloggers mugged by regulators become economic libertarians.  Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission issued its “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising,” last updated in 1980. These rules historically regulated what celebrity endorsers can say and how advertisers can use research claims.”