I recently expe­ri­enced a rather painful injury to my left eye.  My 7 month old man­aged to poke me in the eye while we were play­ing, and I ended up with a 5mm corneal abra­sion.  While not an incred­i­bly seri­ous injury, a 5mm corneal abra­sion (dead cen­ter on the eye, mind you) is very painful and it dras­ti­cally reduces your abil­ity to see.  It hurts to blink, it hurts not to blink.  You end up in a con­stant state of try­ing to find the least painful direc­tion to look, and the dark­est cor­ner of the room in which to do it.  Due to the late­ness of the hour, I had to wait until morn­ing to see an eye doc­tor and by the time morn­ing finally came, I was in agony.  To put it bluntly, the expe­ri­ence totally sucked.

I must admit that I did find some value in the expe­ri­ence, how­ever.  When nearly every aspect of your daily life relies on your abil­ity to see rel­a­tively clearly, los­ing that abil­ity stops you in your tracks.  This might sound a bit obvi­ous, but it is dif­fi­cult to truly under­stand it with­out expe­ri­enc­ing it first hand.  You find your­self rely­ing on your other senses to help you get through the day.  Feel­ing your way around, lis­ten­ing for the dog so you don’t step on the poor thing, hop­ing you remem­ber where the cof­fee table is.  You end up rely­ing more and more on your other senses to get you through the day, espe­cially the sense of touch.

It was the act of feel­ing my way down the hall to find the bath­room that gave me the idea behind this arti­cle.  Dur­ing our nor­mal day to day lives, many of us sim­ply go about our rou­tines.  We have goals that we seek to achieve, and most of us approach our goals with famil­iar and obvi­ous method­ol­ogy.  This may get the job done, but could we be miss­ing some­thing?  I def­i­nitely think so. (more…)

The Asso­ci­ated Press recently announced that the Fed­eral Trade Commission’s “Guide Con­cern­ing the Use of Endorse­ments and Tes­ti­mo­ni­als” will be revised soon.  All week, arti­cles have been pop­ping up across the Inter­net report­ing that these changes will intro­duce reg­u­la­tion of blogs and blog­gers by the FTC.

What they fail to report, is that FTC reg­u­la­tions already apply to blog­gers and their blogs.  In fact, these reg­u­la­tions apply to use of email, Twit­ter, Face­book, MySpace, just to name a few.

Blogs and dis­cus­sion boards are both dis­cussed in the FTC’s “Guide­lines Con­cern­ing the Use of Endorse­ments and Tes­ti­mo­ni­als in Adver­tis­ing, Notice of pro­posed changes,” but not as newly reg­u­lated media.  The pend­ing changes to the guide intro­duce new exam­ple sce­nar­ios intended to illus­trate how FTC reg­u­la­tion may apply in some sit­u­a­tions.  The guide is not the def­i­n­i­tion of the law, nor does it encom­pass every pos­si­ble sce­nario in which the FTC can take action.  The sole pur­pose for the guide is to act as, well, a guide. (more…)