Soundbite: Everybody’s Selling Something

by Rachel Sklar | 11:13 am, October 8th, 2009

2008-04-28-WHCD159 “Because the more we are sold to — and, believe it, we are being pitched every minute — the more immune we are to it all.

Choire Sicha is the co-founder of TheAwl.com.“

— Awl co-founder Choire Sicha ridiculing the FCC’s new disclosure guidelines for bloggers…and demonstrating the benefits of good product placement.

We’re not sure if this last line of Sicha’s piece was meant to be meta, but it’s certainly a fitting capper for the article. Which, by the way, is both smart and funny. Smartest line: “Unfortunately, whole careers, both online and off, are built upon stealth endorsement.” Funniest line: “Who will prevent these man-eaters of commerce from persuading me that my personal escape from Thunderdome must not be Pepsi-fueled?”

Read the op-ed here and more about the new FTC guidelines here.

Photo by Rachel Sklar, taken here.

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Choire Sicha, Federal Trade Commission, FTC, New York Times, The Awl

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George Will: Massa ‘Weirdness’ Spells Trouble For Dems In November

by Glynnis MacNicol | 8:18 am, Monday

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Eric Massa may be gone but he is certainly not yet forgotten (though probably a number of people are giving it their best shot). More troubling, at least for the Dems, is that his hangover effect (and we're not just talking "tickle fights" here) may be months in the curing. At least that's what George Will thinks.

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China Warns Google Advertisers to Obey Censorship Laws, or Else

by Colby Hall | 8:23 am, Monday

There may be a “99.9 per cent” chance that Google is going to shut down its Chinese engine Google.cn, as we learned this weekend, and that presents its advertising partners with a tricky choice: Stick with the company with whom they’ve enjoyed past success and risk bannination in the Chinese market, or defect to Chinese search engines at the cost of familiarity — and freedom from censorship.

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