The FTC, (Federal Trade Commission), announced this week that it is beefing up the rules regarding paid endorsements by bloggers and Tweeters saying they love/use a product but in reality are shills for the company. This new regulation by the FTC is the first real change they’ve had in the rules since the early 1980s. From celebrities endorsing products on shows like “Oprah” to unknown so-called “users” who rave about the products on their blog, Twitter or Facebook pages, the Truth in Advertising guidelines didn’t touch social media until now. Read the rest of this entry »

Videomaker.com has a new look! Thanks to the hard work of many of our team members, we were able to launch our shiny new website yesterday. Not only are we proud of the new look, but we’ve added some new features, as well.

You may have noticed our Highlights section now has a “roll-over” feature, to help you find our newest articles with ease.

Also, from our homepage, you can “Connect with Videomaker” and subscribe to Videomaker’s Channel on YouTube, become a fan of our Facebook page, be our friend on Myspace, and follow us on Twitter, all with just a click of a button.

So take a look around, enjoy the new site, and be sure to leave a comment below to let us know what you think!

Anyone who knows me knows that I constantly rant about the blatherings on social networking sites. People who so mistrust the whole Big Brother concept and identity theft woes seem to think nothing of posting everything from extremely personal data to photos of their kids on a social site that is completely run on automation. And they connect with unknown strangers who connect with unknown strangers who connect… etc, until they have a huge pile of virtual friends who in the real world they might not have given out their name to, much less their home phone number.

A while back, I pulled down my Facebook account because a very strange person from my past contacted me and insisted on “reconnecting” as friends.

This person who is NOT a friend, but is one of those former coworker-from-hell personalities, contacted me via FB requesting a friend invite. We were never friends before but she continued to send me badgering email requests so badly that I had to remove my account. I had a public profile, and was unable to change it to a private one, despite going through all the steps to make it so.

Recently, technology and media journalist Shelly Palmer wrote in his blog about a scary moment when his wife’s Facebook account was actually hijacked by a hacker and her friends received strange notices from the hacker posing as her. Read that scary account here.

I, for one, am signing off FB for now, I have other things to do than talk about myself all day. (As, ironically, I write this blog about myself!)

Twitter just might become the next Social Networking site to become a Google enterprise.

We heard this morning from Shelly Palmer, host and editor of Mediabytes that there’s talk going around the circuit that Google is looking to add Twitter to it’s host of internet companies that it now owns.

Palmer’s blog links to a story in Tech Crunch stating that Facebook offered to buy the social site for a half a billion dollars a while back, but Twitter turned the popular social networking site down.

Facebook, like MySpace, is a networking site where users can join others’ groups, and add photos to their pages and send messages, updates, photos and other personal information to their selected friends.  You can allow your page to be public or private, and some people like to collect “friends” all over the world. Read the rest of this entry »