Books, Blogs, and Beyond

Learning about the FTC Endorsements & Testimonials Guides at BlogPaws 2010

One of the coolest parts of working on the BlogPaws 2010 pet blogger conference has been connecting — or re-connecting — with some amazing people involved in the online pet community. That's especially true of the speakers! Today we released a preliminary speaker page, with keynotes including Charlotte Reed (check out her Pet Writing Conference coming up next week), our pet blogging buddy Dr. Larry McDaniel, and Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer.

I'm not going to list the other 18 (and counting) speakers here — that's not why you came — but one of them is Mary K. Engle, Associate Director for Advertising Practices at the FTC. She'll be speaking on a panel disussing "The Dos and Don'ts of Product Reviews." As part of putting together the speaker page, Mary sent me to a page on the FTC site where she's posted a set of videos discussing the FTC's Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides. In several of the videos, she speaks directly to how the Guides affect bloggers. Here's an example:

Twitter Libel Suit Dismissed "With Prejudice"

By Tom Collins

A while back (I know, I've been neglecting this blog horribly, consumed with our move to CO and our exciting work on the BlogPaws 2010 pet bloggers conference), I wrote yet another post, More on Lawyers vs. Social Media, criticizing lawyers who seem clueless about the costs and consequences of attacking bloggers with traditional litigators' tools. In that post, I described how the lawyers managed to publicize an allegedly libelous tweet (from a Twitter account with ~20 followers) and expose it to millions of people. 

Today, Wendy Davis reported on MediaPost's Daily Online Examiner that Judge Diane Larsen threw the suit out, ruling that the tweet was "nonactionable as a matter of law."

Digital Literacy is an Essential Part of Literacy

By Tom Collins

Yvonne and I had a wonderful dinner last night with our friend and client, Sybil Stershic, and her husband Mike. Sybil found us a quiet little Italian restaurant in Canandaigua, NY, Casa de Pasta, where the food and service were excellent ...

But I digress ... it's a part of the enjoyable conversation we had last night, combined with Gord Hotchkiss' Search Insider piece that hit my inbox this morning, The New Speed of Information, I logged in to write about.

Following a Leader into Web 2.0

By Tom Collins

Are you a leader in any of your organizations - business, professional, social?

Yesterday, Federal Computer Week blog reported the GSA has reached an agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that "make it possible for federal agencies to use new-media tools while meeting their legal requirements."

Hello? Maybe the GSA missed it, but as of this writing 1,124,225 people had viewed the first of President Obama's weekly YouTube addresses on The White House YouTube Channel, which began just a couple of days after the inauguration in January:

Okay, so some folks at GSA probably knew about it.

But what's up with them entering into agreements now that supposedly authorize agencies to "immediately begin using new-media tools that let people post, share, and comment on videos and photos on the Web." The assumption seems to be that the terms of service agreements that nobody reads somehow violated some government rules somewhere.