Bloggers beware?

What you're about to read was written by me.

All the tools and labor were paid by me.

The advertisers? I probably pay more to have them on my blog than they pay me.

Free products? Scroll down and look at my suit. Do I look like I was outfitted by Starbucks or the Wisconsin Cheeseman (two of my sponsors)?

Have I disclosed enough?

It's hard to say. To the Federal Trade Commission, it may not be.

The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments. The new rules are scheduled to take effect Dec. 1.

An existing FTC rule that states product reviewers must reveal any connection they have with advertisers was extended to bloggers, according to news reports.

The rules carry a fine as high as $11,000 if product endorsers and reviewers don't comply.

This would, for the first time, bring bloggers under FTC guidelines that ban allegedly deceptive or unfair business practices, according to news reports.

The guidelines, of course, will be hard to enforce, and the FTC admits this. No new personnel would be hired to handle the new responsibilities, and there are thousands - maybe millions - of bloggers to watch after.

One FTC administrator put it best when he said the rule extension could create a "whack-a-mole enforcement" scenario in which the agency goes after only those who blatantly disregard the rules.

Or it'll go after those sites that get a lot of traffic - and there aren't many of those. Most bloggers get less traffic than I do. We all have dreams that, someday, we can turn what we do into a Drudge Report or Huffington Post for our specialty. More often than not, however, that doesn't happen.

To the FTC, the rules would allow the agency to go after bloggers for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest, according to news reports.

The rules could be quite strict, even extending to the practice of affiliate links - for example, a music blogger who links to a song on Amazon MP3 or iTunes that earns an affiliate commission in the process, according to the Associated Press.

From my vantage point, the rules are a double-edged sword. It's fair for the consumer to know if a blogger is working as an agent for an industry or a company.

Truth - or, as Bob Woodward said, the most obtainable version of it - always wins out over lies and deception. High profile bloggers could ruin their credibility - much like reporters would - if the consumer were to later learn that they're on the side of the seller... not the buyer.

But I'm also a civil libertarian. Besides the obvious free-speech concerns I have, I feel that it's unfair for bloggers to be singled out for something that the so-called mainstream media does all the time.

Why shouldn't Greta Van Susteren disclose that her husband performs consulting work, among many things, for Sarah Palin whenever she provides an always too-gentle profile on the former Alaska governor?

For the average blogger, however, all those issues are irrelevant. Only people with big pockets would be able to challenge the rules in court. They will go into effect, and there is little anybody can do - short of a Bill Gates - to stop it.

The biggest question is what should bloggers do now. Providing a disclosure statement may be difficult for the First Amendment defender who views the FTC's actions as an intrusion on free speech.

In practice, however, adding a simple disclosure statement at the bottom of a post (if that's what the FTC considers a legitimate form of disclosure) should be no different than a political advertiser adding a line from its promoted candidate - "this is so-and-so, and I approve this message" - at the end of a television or radio commercial.

Perhaps advertisers will feel that this disclosure will discredit their message. But, as always, truth should always be the goal.

Nikon can do business with a blogger - and have the blogger write a complementary article on a camera that was provided by the company. The entry should have a disclosure statement, sure. But the disclosure shouldn't matter to the reader if the blog post includes testimony from a Nikon user - perhaps a newspaper or magazine photographer - who has a credible reputation and whose opinions are rarely disputed.

Will the disclosure matter if the blog post carries a slideshow of high-resolution Nikon photographs that are clearly better than what a Cannon camera can provide?

As a Nikon user who hasn't gotten a freebie, I would be glad to oblige.