Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds | CNET News.com

technology firms are using a modern twist on this idea, called prediction markets, as a way to save money, harness the distributed knowledge of their rank-and-file employees, and even answer questions like: When will this software ship? And what will memory prices be like in a few months?

After a good amount of debate on the net, PayPerPost decided to make it a policy for bloggers to disclose if the post is sponsored.

Bloggers must disclose sponsored posts - Yahoo! News

Before this week, advertisers were barred by PayPerPost Inc. from telling bloggers they can’t disclose the sponsorship, but bloggers were able to decide on their own whether or not to do so. Under the new policy, bloggers must disclose that they are accepting payment, either in the write-up or in a general disclosure policy on the blogger’s Web journal.

“Ever since we launched, there’s been a lot of controversy about disclosure,” said Ted Murphy, PayPerPost’s chief executive.

Besides other bloggers questioning the ethics of receiving payments without disclosure, the Federal Trade Commission said in a Dec. 7 staff opinion that failure to disclose could, in some cases, violate consumer-protection laws on deception. The FTC did not single out PayPerPost or say whether it would launch any investigation.