Did you recommend or endorse an I.T. product on your blog…?

Have you you recommended or endorsed an I.T. product on your tech blog…?

The FTC wants To confirm: Bloggers “Probably” Won’t Get stumped $11,000 for fines. You may have heard, that recently the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has upset a lot of bloggers and opend up a huge can of worms.

The agency this week announced new guidelines that require bloggers and celebrities to make it known when they receive payments for endorsing products!

Can you imagine how some companies feel about that? It made a lot of people very anxious especially those that are launching new I.T. Products that get huge amounts of publicity through the blogosphere.  But that part was not controversial — though the guidelines had lots of questions on what that meant and who was a blogger. What really made people mad was the the fact that if you were caught endorsing a product and had not labelled it a paid advert; your any violation of the new guidelines could cost bloggers up to $11,000 per incident!

Since this time it looks like there is a re-think from the FTC on how they are going to manage this situation they have created. Apparantly if you endorse products through your blog you’re going to get a warning from the FTC about this unless you clearly label if you did or did not recieve remuneration for your review.

But how would the federal trade commision stop bloggers who operate on .com domains that do not live in the United States? And what of people that endorse US products that again host their blogs off US soil. It sounds like a huge can of worms…now then.. what were we going to blog about how about McAfee.com and its virus scanner.