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The Federal Trade Commission Monday released revised regulations holding bloggers responsible for disclosing any freebies or payment associated with their writing.

“The post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement,” the FTC said in a statement. “Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

The regulations may have widespread ramifications considering the millions of bloggers and the variety of their audiences. The Associated Press reported Monday bloggers who are caught without providing this disclosure could face $11,000 penalties after the regulations go into effect Dec. 1, 2010.

The disclosure is very similar to the Federal Communication Commission’s Payola Rules for broadcast media, which state that “all sponsored material must be explicitly identified at the time of broadcast as paid for and by whom, except when it is clear that the mention of a product or service constitutes sponsorship identification.”

This update to the FTC’s regulations on testimonials and endorsements is the first since 1980. While the regulations don’t declare how disclosures must be made, they must be “clear and conspicuous,” the AP reported.

Some bloggers touted the new regulations and welcomed recognition of their presence in mass marketing. Others, however, worried the rules would be too difficult to enforce and would lead to favoritism.

MediaBistro’s GalleyCat blog listed several difficult questions and potential problematic areas with the new regulations, including questions about liability if a blogger is writing for a news organization.

“If an unpaid blogger at the Huffington Post ‘endorses’ a consumer product without meeting the FTC guidelines for disclosure of ‘material connections’ to the makers of that consumer product, who’s liable: the blogger or the Huffington Post?” the post asks.

While the new regulations specifically refer to the expansion of regulations on blogs, the FTC also tightened rules on celebrity endorsements, which include mentions in Twitter streams or social networks.

“Along with advertisers, stars can be held liable for making false and misleading claims about a product under the new rules,” the New York Post reported.

A shiny new NPR.org revealed itself Monday with a simpler homepage design packed with multimedia features and customizable choices.

Like most major media websites still afloat, NPR.org aims to keep radio content its core but offer up multi-platform, all-purpose news.

The new site is a major improvement to its tightly-fonted, cramped and confusing predecessor. Now, homepage focuses on news, arts and the latest audio clips from the organization’s most popular shows.

National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller sat down with Newsweek to discuss the site’s re-launch and strategic steps for online media. Schiller, who was senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com just six months ago, has a unique perspective from the top of an industry struggling to survive.

One classic battle playing out in newsrooms and online offices across the country is the delicate balance of the traditional company and its online additions. Schiller says the relationship between the online newsroom and radio producers and reporters is symbiotic.

“In creating all this digital content, it’s not just to service NPR.org,” she said. “We’re giving them more digital content that they can pull down and use on their site.”

As a national public broadcasting institution, however, NPR is faced with a different set of challenges than private media groups in blending local public content with national news. Schiller feels local news stations are the ones suffering the most in the economic downturn, and says NPR.org is attempting to dissuade that trend.

“One of the major focuses of our digital initiative is to give stations the tools, the resources, the knowledge, and the infrastructure, so they can create a great experience in their communities,” she told Newsweek.

Local content, however, proves to be buried in national headlines and difficult to access on the new site, however. The site promotes its many blogs and includes local news in a few select places when relevant, but a strong push for promoting local content is a bit lost.

The new site may draw in new audiences, but its shift to multiplatform production indicates a core change in NPR’s business model that may be a tall order for an organization with such a strong production tradition.

We’ve spent a lot of time the last two years updating our company Twitter account, where we share links to interesting stories and quick thoughts.  In the process our blog sort of became a place for long form content only.  We posted short thoughts and links on Twitter and longer stuff on the blog, and that was pretty much the way things went.

After some reflection, this struck us as kind of dumb.  We were needlessly limiting our blog to long form posts only, and posting a lot of great content to Twitter only, where our regular blog readers wouldn’t see it.

So we’ve decided to tweak our strategy a bit.  Moving forward, we plan to supplement our longer posts with shorter entries consisting of quotes, links and/or videos.  Inspired by the designs of blogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous, we are using Wordpress Asides to differentiate our shorter posts from our longer ones.  We won’t be posting every link or video we post to Twitter to the blog, as posting five or six entries a day here is too much.  Instead, we’ll only post the best stuff from our Twitter feed here.  Follow us on twitter if you want to see everything.

From reading some blogs, it sounds like others are making the transition from posting essays to posting shorter entries, as if this is a new thing.  It really isn’t.  Our blog started out as a place to post short, quick thoughts and evolved into a spot devoted exclusively to longer post.  So we’re actually reverting back a bit to our original strategy, inspired by the way folks like Kottke, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan and John Gruber have been blogging for years.

Guest post by Alan Haburchak

The morning of day two here at the Personal Democracy Forum conference was all about online communities, what they mean, how they can be used and what they say about culture and global culture and society today. Randi Zuckerberg (the other Zuckerberg), Facebook's head of marketing was up first and talked a little bit about how communities have arisen on on Facebook that have lead to real-life movements like the anti-farc protests that occurred in Colombia last year. But other than pointing that that that group had used social media to organize, she didn't have much more to say.

Next up was Alec Ross, who serves as Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ross explained how Sec. Clinton is re-imagining the idea of diplomacy to not just be able "white guys in white shirts with red ties" talking to each other, but rather a citizen-to-citizen approach. As an example he touted the State Department's SMS-based Pakistani-relief initiative that they pioneered earlier this year.

The really amazing highlight of the morning however was Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. Wesch gave a shortened version of a presentation about YouTube as a cultural phenomenon, which he and 200 students at Kansas State University created. There is video of Wesch's talk at PDF09, though the quality is not ideal. The amazing thing was the collective joy in the room as everyone felt the hope that Wesch expressed for what online communities like YouTube might be able to create in the face of the pessemistic attitude that according to Wesch, had been cultivated among a lot of young people since the 1990s. Highlights from Wesch's presentation were his clips from the Free Hugs and MadV – The Message memes.

Finally the morning closed with Mark Pesce, know as a digital futurist, who talked about the inherrent potenital danger of what he called "ad-hocracies" on the web. As evidence, he pointed to the fight between Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology. Pesce's talk was intersting, discussing how because of their size, the members of the church were able to break the social contract of Wikipedia, ultimately leading to Wikipedia banning them from editing the site. Speaking after Wesch's emotionally charged YouTube presentation, Pesce's point came across as too academic, although important as internet communities reach critical mass.

Ultimately what I and I think most people will take away from this look at web communities is the sense of hope in was Ross and Wesch had to say. Diplomacy can be as simple and effective as sending $5 to someone in Pakistan who needs it from your cell phone, and while YouTube comments may be the worst thing on the internet, the ability of that community to be incredibly personal AND to inspire positive action en masse is amazing.

Guest post by Jessica Rudis

Two of the biggest announcements made at PDF this year complement each other in an interesting way. The first announcement, made on Monday, was that YouTube had launched a reporting center that teaches citizen journalists skills to improve the quality of their reporting.  The second announcement, and perhaps the biggest news to come out of the conference, was that the U.S. Government has launched a project to increase transparency and accountability, providing open data on a new Web site.

These are complementary because, of course, any properly functioning democracy needs to have an informed citizenry.  For years, people have relied on media gatekeepers to set the national agenda, inform them of current events, and act as government watchdogs.  Of course this has changed in recent years, but it will be exciting to see things change even more when citizens are taught how to be better reporters and given the data necessary to track government spending and activity.

Having an army of citizens to monitor government data and report on what’s going on would be a great thing.  It won’t diminish the role of traditional journalism because there will always be a need for serious investigative journalism.  Journalists will still need to go deeper than what is handed to them to make sure the data is accurate, numbers aren’t being fudged, and that secrets aren’t being kept.  The government may say it is being open and transparent, but it is up to journalists to ensure that that is really the case.

One of the themes of this conference, We.Gov, is becoming a reality.  As long as people stay interested in looking at the government data online (which may be hard, with things like the “Charlie Bit Me” video as competition for attention), we can participate more in our government than any generation before us.  We have already proven that citizen participation on the Internet can affect the tone and impact a political campaign, now we have the opportunity to use the Internet to directly affect policy-making as well.

Ning’s Gina Bianchini talks to Personal Democracy Forum attendees about working with The Bivings Group on The Pickens Plan’s social action network. Video by Alan Haburchak.

Guest post by Alan Haburchak

It seems like there is a certain generally accepted truth about age and ideology in America: Young people are liberal and vote Democratic while the older generation tends to trend more conservative. There's even that old chestnut usually attributed to Winston Churchill: "If you're young and not a liberal you have no heart, if you're old and not a conservative, you have no brain."

That seems like it would make sense, and is certainly backed up by exit polling in the 2008 presidential race where two-thirds of 18-29 year olds voted for Barack Obama. But in a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum today, Simon Rosenberg and Morley Winograd of the New Democrat Network, presented research that showed political leanings are intensely generational. The Millenial Generation (the kids today, born after 1980 with their Facebook and their Twitter) identify as "liberal" almost two to one. No surprise there.

But, the same survey given to Generation X (those born between 1960 and 1980) when they were the age Millenials are now shows over 60% identifying as conservative, and the Boomer generation (born between 1943 and 1960) split almost down the middle. Young people have not always been so overtly liberal minded as they are now, according to Rosenburg and Winograd.

For Rosenberg and Winograd, the reason for this lies in a theory put forth in a 1991 book called Generations. According to the authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, the twentieth century, and actually the last 400 years of human history can be divided into twenty-year four-generation cycles, with each successive generation conforming to a specific type. Todays Millenials are the current cycle's "civic" generation, they're optimisitic and believe in community action and volunteering (the hallmarks of the Obama presidency). The Gen Xers on the other hand come from the "reactive" generation, characterized by self-reliance and entrepreneurship (the political hero of this group: Reagan).

The relevance of all this theorizing, according to Rosenberg and Winograd, is in how it has and will continue to shape the political landscape of the United States. Given how liberal the Millenials are, and the fact that there are more of them than any generation since the Boomers, they will probably dominate at least the next two electoral cycles, if not even farther into the future. This means that if Rosenberg and Winograd are right, the Dems can plan on another big win in 2012 and probably in 2016 as well.

That begs the question, what comes next in the generational cycle? According to the theory, the next generation is going to fall into the "adaptive" category, which means they might be a lot like John McCain's "silent generation," meaning a lot of them will have deeply-held conservative beliefs and will probably wonder how their parents can be so liberal and open-minded. Plus, they'll want to know why the old folks won't shut up about this Face-Twitter thing they used when they were kids.
 

Those of us familiar with rat race involved in nabbing a coveted internship at a well-known news organization know all too well the pressure of stacking your best clips, skills and assets against a sea of competitors.

Those who do get through are usually more than grateful to be working for that news organization for free, but the Huffington Post has changed the game by asking people to bid on and pay for a two-to-three month internship.

"Jumpstart Your Career in the Blogsphere With An Eye Opening Internship at The Huffington Post in New York or Washington," the ad for the internship reads. "Includes: a two-three month internship at The Huffington Post in NYC or D.C. Must be at least 18 years old. NYC is the main office and D.C. is the political office. Winner can choose which location they would like."

The bidding, through CharityBuzz, is currently at $13,000. HuffPo donated the internship, and all proceeds will go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

The auction has been met with some outrage from members of the media.

“You do the work, and you pay them,” said Colleen McCain Nelson of DallasNews.com. “In the midst of an avalanche of bad news about traditional media, this may be the most disheartening development I’ve encountered.”

Bloggers at MediaBistro’s FishbowlNY ask, “Will the buyer actually work for HuffPo or will someone with deep pockets gift it to a lucky relative or friend?”

A spokesperson for HuffPo said they’re participating because “it’s a good cause,” according to AdAge.com.

Bidding will be open until May 28, and the next minimum bid is at $15,500.