In case you haven't seen news on this, the FTC has issued a large set of guidelines (81 pages) to help prevent people from being secretly paid to blog or post rave endorsements of products by the companies that make them. The regulations require disclosure of pay received for such reviews, or face a $11K file from the FTC. Like most regulations, there are a lot of questions about whether this will actually work, and what the loopholes are in the document that prevent it from actually being effective. The new guidelines take effect December 1st, 2009. Here's a few articles on the topic:

 

 

 

 

and a link to the regulation: