plz tell me

I blogged about the idea of sponsored tweets a while back and wanted to mention again that I think it’s a great idea especially at a very local level. A UDR would go even further in providing value to everyone involved.

I paid for the development of a disclosure policy plugin which was in many ways even simpler.
You just create a set of things you need to disclose based upon keywords like company names, and the plugin would add footer notes, and it would apply them retroactively.
You could for instance disclose “I am a Google employee, though the thoughts on this blog are my own”

If you left Google, you could change the disclosure to “I was a Google employee up until MM/DD/YY”

Ultimately hardly anyone used it, and those that did used it as a way of advertising – I heard reports of revenue increases of 30%+

I haven’t updated it as there wasn’t enough interest.

I now have better solutions planned, but not specifically for disclosure.

Any central registry has another pitfall – many would look on that as being some kind of linking or advertising scheme, and for affiliates, it is a traffic leak.

I believe the best solution would loop in the major CMS providers with a disclosure/conflict field as ubiquitous as title, body, date, author, and tags. Such a field could do at least three things:
1) Allows for disclosing the spectrum of conflicts, getting us out of the debate about conflict as a black-and-white issue. There are many degrees of conflict that readers could care about. Just a few categories are: No conflict, friend/family, shareholder, cash/goods $100, employee
2) Defaults as “No conflict” so authors/posts shift from staying silent on the topic to making an affirmative statement. This is critical. Once people are making affirmative statements about their potential conflict, they are more likely to own up to the reality of their conflict. Silence on conflict is what all the hypocrites use as default, providing conflict excuses only when called out.
3) Possibly, links to universal registry from this field so readers can see more detail on relationship and possibly find other participants in same campaign.

I mention the CMS providers because they have the ability to change the disclosure landscape by adding a single field/default. Few single companies are in such a position to drive transparency change for all bloggers/marketers.

I think industry-wide cooperation to this degree is a longshot, but enjoy seeing IZEA continue to drive the discussion of best practices and tools to maximize transparency for years to come…

I might use 100 different affiliate links in a day

Snippet of code?

Any disclosure has to transfer to feeds, and has to work with images off, and be totally accessible.

Thus is has to be in text form, in the posts.

There is no other alternative.