Bloggers Must Disclose Product Ties

The Apex Building, headquarters of the Federal...

“Bloggers, Tweeters and online marketers will have to tell consumers when they are paid or given freebies to write positive reviews or postings, federal regulators said Monday.

The Federal Trade Commission released updated guidelines Monday designed to provide clarity for bloggers and other online writers about their responsibility to provide consumer disclosure as well as liability issues they face for making false or deceptive claims about products and services.” (WSJ)

Not an issue for me, since I am not paid or given freebies by anyone for anything I write on FmH. (See the ‘disclaimers’ section in the right hand sidebar.)

Readership?

Steady decline in FmH readership continues. Now ranging between 50-120 visitors per day, with an average of less than 100. This is, of course, exclusive of those following via RSS, but I’m not sure that is a substantial number. To those of you no longer visiting FmH, can you leave a comment (grin) explaining, thanks?

Toward a Million?

Shameless self-promotion dept.: It is only six months until Halloween, more or less, and you know what happens shortly thereafter, don’t you? It’ll be the tenth anniversary of FmH in November. So far, my hit counter has recorded around 825,000 hits since the inception of this weblog. I suppose it is out of the question to hit the 1,000,000 mark as a birthday present to FmH, isn’t it? That would require 175,000 hits in 180 days, abit less than 1,000 hits a day on average, which is an order of magnitude beyond our normal readership and three times what FmH has attracted at its peak. But, if you ever thought you might disseminate a link to Follow Me Here, now would be the time.

Update: It never occurred to me, as a commenter pointed out (thanks, stan), that RSS readership doesn’t drive up the hit counter. This may mean that I am alot closer to the million mark than I think. If a significant number of people read my RSS feed (how would I know? drop me a comment if you do, please), it might be part of the explanation of the apparent progressive falloff in readership from earlier years. (I have been convinced that I lost a significant segment of my readership when I took several months’ hiatus a couple of years ago…) Of course, it may also be that FmH is attracting less interest than it used to, either intrinsically or because there is so much more competition out there. (None of which is to say that I am doing this for the circulation numbers!)

Housekeeping

arboleda perdida

Have people noticed, toward the bottom of the sidebar on this page, the ‘Top Posts’ and ‘Top Clicks’ lists? I must say, to the extent that the ‘top posts’ really reflect relative interest of my readers, I’m surprised at what appears up there on the list.

Housekeeping

Jerry asked: “Are you changing your blog format daily?” Yeah, playing around with different “themes”. It is so easy, virtually one-click, now that I’m using WordPress. I’m only doing it while I search for the ‘perfect’ setup, then I hope it’ll be static, in case it’s disorienting to my readers. Comments?

Housekeeping

Please enter some comments to this or another post. I would like to be sure that the WordPress commenting system is working correctly for me. Thanks in advance…