Webeomatics - that is exactly along the lines of what I am hoping to do with Disclosr here - the plans are basically sketched out, now we need to get the service developed so I am working on finding the right programmer to build it. If you know of someone, please let me know

Second I like the idea of a disclosure page. All the info in one place. It would be helpful to have a template to follow however.

I also notice different opinons about what non-financial relationships ought to be disclosed. Obviously if you work for a company or on their payroll, or own stock disclosure is good, but what if your wife’s friend works at a company and you blog about it? This could easily be misconstrued by a reader as back-scratching even if there is no payment or free iPods. This may fall under the realm of the difficulty in listing all the relationships. But if there were a list of suggested relationships that would help a lot.

We seemed to agree that, as publishers, it’s a good practice to state our biases and be aware of them too. In that spirit, it’s helpful for the group that gathered last night to be aware of its biases.

There were plenty of bloggers and technologists and businessfolk present. There were folks who understand how to create algorithms and tools that might -augment- the social processes of reputation creation and management. All these voices are important. But the biases of such a crowd can lead us towards tackling social problems with overly technological solutions, and towards technological determinism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism).

How can we counteract this tendency and maximize our effectiveness in reaching the group’s goals? Simply keeping this bias and tendency in mind will help a lot.

I think it will be really helpful to bring in someone with a background and biases that lead -away- from technological determinism. Someone, for instance, with a deep understanding of how people judge and communicate reputation. We’re off to a great start, and perhaps a participant from the realm of anthropology/sociology can help us avoid excessive focus and reliance on -tool-building- as an approach what really is a -social- matter.

I’ll try to bring in a friend or two from that realm. If you agree that this is important, and if you know anyone in the world of social sciences/media studies, please invite them to participate here.

– Howard

There’s no excuse for what happened in the Edelman/WalMart affair.In my own firm, and in my blog, I always disclose and always tell the truth, because I feel as though I am writing to a group of friends. Sometimes those friends disagree with me, but most of the time they are polite about it, or they announce that they are leaving me.It would have been easy to create the WalMart blog and then post somewhere else that it was an experiment in creating a semi-fictional SecondLife type experience. That’s fun and valid, if harder to explain to WalMart the Client.

I believe that one’s own reputation is the most important thing you have. It’s a lot easier to disclose (yes, this is a client or a sponsor) and make your points than to hold back and risk being exposed.

The fact is we all have some conflicts of interest, even if they don’t involve money: things done by friends of ours, things that will help our lives, etc. and they are inevitable. Also, from working at Intel I learned that in a public company there are disclosure and non-disclosure rules that are dictated by outside entities.

It wouldn’t matter WHAT we wanted to dislose at Intel –the SEC has its own ideas about what’s necessary, and sometimes they conflict with the human impulse to tell the whole truth.

One last point: language has a lot to do with things regarding disclosure. There are words, and there are substitute words that seem to be synonyms but are just a little different. My mother used to teach me to tell the truth, while telling me that if I couldn’t say something nice I shouldn’t say anything. This greases the social contract, but it doesn’t take care of the problem of disclosure. Tact, or choosing one’s words carefully, might take care of it more. One of the problems with blogging is that it’s usually on the fly and immediate, and often unedited. That, in itself, creates problems.

That’s why this is such a difficult issue, and I hope we don’t end up with a bunch of disclosure rules like the SEC In the absence of such rules, I will continue to keep telling the truth and trying not to hurt anybody along the way.
(crossposted to Tech Crunch)

…

The page I’m looking at:

http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2006/10/25/talking-about-disclosure-round-table-recap/

What I’m thinking:

“Who wrote this?”

Seriously. Who are you?

I’m a reporter. I’ve never read your blog before. I don’t know who you are.

A byline would seem to be the absolute minimum amount of disclosure required before publishing an article of this type. Where’s yours?