Basically, if you’re pretending to be an objective reviewer of a product or service, but you’re actually being compensated in some way for posting positive reviews, the FTC can slap you with a fine of up to $11,000 per violation if you don’t disclose that compensation up front.

On the face of it, it’s an excellent modification to rules that were written back when the closest things we had to blogs were mimeographed and stapled fanzines. It’s the 21st century equivalent of forcing an advertiser to put a little “ADVERTISEMENT” banner at the top and bottom of a newspaper ad that’s formatted to look like an article.

And quite honestly, the online world probably needs something of the sort—especially in the video game industry. If you’ve never worked as a game reviewer (particularly in a staff position at a magazine), your mind would be blown by the sheer volume of swag that gets thrown your way by PR folks who desperately need you to say something great about a game that might not be.

image © Cnet.com

The most egregious example I ever came across in my own career was back in 2000, when I was working as a News Editor for a gaming magazine that no longer exists:

A European game publisher who had the rights to make games based on a famous athlete flew me and about a dozen other U.S. journalists across the Atlantic on their own dime and put us up for a long weekend. Ostensibly, it was a press junket to visit the company’s offices and see the titles they had in development, but in reality, it was a three-day party. As soon as we got the three or four hours of previewing the company’s games out of the way, it was nothing but clubbing, fancy dining, lots of drinking and VIP seats to see their celebrity athlete compete.

When I got back to the States and had to write up the previews of the games I’d seen, I found myself in a predictable quandary: the games that they showed me weren’t very good at all, particularly their big-money athlete’s game. At the same time, I did feel a tremendous sense of gratitude for my all-expenses-paid European vacation.

I tried not to let that affect my previews—which are generally written from an optimistic perspective as a rule, since they’re not reviews of finished products—but I couldn’t swear that I was as objective as I would have been had the company just sent me builds of the games to play in the office. And when it came time to review them, I handed the duties off to someone else. So my conscience is fairly clear on that front, but I know that some of my peers chose not to take the same route.

However, as well intentioned as these new rules are, there are a number of points of concern. Dan Gillmor sums up some of them in an excellent piece posted yesterday on Mediactive:

First, the new system is unworkable in practice, which is bad enough. Worse, the rules are worryingly vague and wide-ranging. Worse yet, they appear to give traditional print and broadcast journalists a pass while applying harsh regulations to bloggers (and others using conversational media of various kinds). Worst and most important, they are, in the end, an attack on markets and free speech, based on a 20th Century notion of media and advertising that simply doesn’t map to the new era.

The advertising of the past was a one-to-many system. Call it broadcasting. The Internet is a many-to-many system. Call that conversation. They are not the same.

As an example, what’s the protocol if one of my game designer friends sends me a free copy of their latest game, which I legitimately happen to like, and I want to tweet about it? 140 characters doesn’t leave much room for me to disclose that I was given free merchandise that may or may not have influenced my opinion.

image © Kotaku.com.au

Similarly, what constitutes “compensation?” The FTC says that free product counts as compensation, but where’s the cutoff? Is the aforementioned example of a free copy of a game enough to meet that threshold? Obviously, you need a copy of the game to be able to review it, and a boxed retail copy will only make you a few bucks if you sell it when you’re done with it. Or is it a volume thing? I know plenty of people in the industry who are on so many comp lists that they haven’t bought a game in years; if they’re not sent a game that they want for free, they have plenty to trade in for enough credit to buy it outright.

I’m reassured by the fact that the FTC is saying that they’re more likely to go after advertisers rather than bloggers, and that they’re focusing on educating and informing everyone of the rules change, instead of leading off with a slew of fines. But at a certain point, these rules need to be enforced if they’re to have any teeth, and that’s when we all need to be vigilant about how that’s done and ready to kick up a fuss if necessary.

If you buy software to protect your kids from the scary parts of the internet, you should be careful that it’s not spying on their private conversations for profit. Because that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

image © Gizmodo

Much as I love the internet, I don’t think I’ll be letting my as-yet-unconceived children get near it until their 43rd birthday.

image © Hasbro

Go ahead and make all of the obvious jokes. Tomorrow, Google and Hasbro are releasing Monopoly City Streets, which turns the entire world into one giant game of Monopoly. It’s a capitalist dream, and it might be the only way you’ll actually be able to buy or sell a house in this economy.

image © Gizmodo?

The image above shows the log entry of the first meaningful connection between two computer nodes. It happened on October 29, 1969. However, the very first heart beat, the first actual connection in which bits were exchanged between two hosts happened 40 years ago today.

Happy (belated) 40th birthday, internet. Hopefully by the time you’re 50, Hallmark will make a card for that.

image © Bryan Stratton

Now that I’ve had a few days to play with version 3.0 of the Facebook iPhone app (which was recently upgraded to 3.01), I can say with confidence that it’s the update I’ve been hoping to see for a long time. In fact, my only criticism is that we didn’t get it months ago, when Facebook went through its last major redesign.

The addition of the menu screen is probably the biggest and best improvement to the app. Navigating the app with nine, Home Screen-like buttons drastically simplifies what was a needlessly overcomplicated UI in the previous version. And being able to add quick links to frequently visited friends’ pages streamlines the browsing experience even more. (In fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing something like this on the actual site, especially if it was implemented discreetly, to avoid the MySpace “who’s in my top eight?” drama.) I also like that there’s a Notifications tab at the bottom of the menu screen, and that the number of unread notifications (not just unread emails) appears on the Facebook icon in the Home Screen.

image © Bryan Stratton

Other things I’m digging on include the ability to finally view and create Notes, see all of your upcoming Events (including friends’ birthdays) and enjoy the full filtered or unfiltered News Feed. The redesigned Chat interface is also quite slick and functional, and I’m glad they didn’t muck up the most useful feature in the original app, which was the ability to use your Friends list as a second Contacts list and call them without leaving the app.

Overall, I think that the app presents a very clean and efficient version of Facebook‘s core features, one that is almost preferable to the main site, especially  if you’re the sort of person who can’t stand seeing a feed that’s choked with quizzes and app postings. I’ll be interested to see how long it takes Facebook app designers to start taking advantage of the iPhone app’s potential and whether or not it’s possible to do so without sacrificing the iPhone app’s streamlined design.

If you haven’t read the comic, what are you waiting for? The AMC series based on the comic might be as little as 18 months away. You’ve spent the last two and a half years pretending that you were hip enough to start watching Mad Men from the first episode and living in fear that someone will discover that you devoured both seasons on DVD within the last six months. Don’t miss your chance to get in on the ground floor with this one.

image © Bryan Stratton/Google Maps/Robert Kirkman/some guy named "Jason"

(Thanks to Darren for bringing this to my attention.)

image © Gizmodo

I’m outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That’s more expensive than murder and six other crimes[...]

Heck, you can do all these crimes, and the total amount will be only $2.2 million. Of course, you can’t really quantify years spent in prison using dollars, but I don’t care. The case of Jammie—and many like hers—is still absolutely outrageous.

Now look, I’m rather a fan of the Obama administration in general, and I don’t even want to think about how much of my work has been stolen over the years, from the software I’ve helped to create to the strategy guides that wind up retyped on FAQ sites a week after they come out. But this is silly.

image © THQ, GameSpot

Whether you’re a fan of the WWE product or not, there’s no denying that there’s an enormous fan base out there who will hungrily devour every scrap of information about it, especially when it comes to the games. So I was more than a little miffed when the aforementioned website, after enjoying months of page-view-padding exclusive looks at WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009, crapped all over it with a C+ review that complained of a general “been there, done that” feel to the game—but never once considered that that might be due to the fact that they’d been playing it for nearly six months by the time the review came out. It seemed like a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt, and it was especially frustrating, because I truly believed that SvR09 was a big leap forward from the previous year’s installment, and I’d like to think that I was in a pretty good position to judge such things.

So it was with no small amount of amusement that I saw today that Gamespot.com had been given the exclusive first look at SmackDown vs. Raw 2010, while that other website has to content itself with posting the box art for the new game.

Game over? You’re damn right it’s over.

image © THQ, GameSpot

(Disclaimer: I have no dog in the race between GameSpot or its competitors. I also haven’t spoken with anyone involved in the production or marketing of the game, so I might be completely off-base with my observations here, which are solely my own opinions. Take ‘em with a grain of salt—or a chair to the head.)