We have to admit the wave of disclosures hasn't been as massive as we anticipated yesterday, particularly if you exclude sarcastic disclosures like this marketing blog's list of all the free samples, zombie newspaper subscriptions and government handouts it received over the years.

It looks like some blogs got their disclosures out of the way earlier in the year, when the FTC rules first made news; the others, we presume, either aren't aware of the regulations or believe the federal government will be no more diligent regulating bloggers than it was regulating financial institutions. A reasonable bet.

The blogs that did disclose their freebies tended to lack the sort of deals — Sony, SeaWorld, etc. — professional fameballer Julia Allison laid on the line yesterday. Which is, frankly, a good thing; hopefully the blogosphere will remain this under-sold-out for years to come. Click the pictures below for some examples:

Music blog Guilt Free Pleasures: After its mom, "who reads Gawker religiously" according to an email it sent us, saw our post yesterday and pestered it, Guilt Free Pleasures disclosed that it got "most if not all" of its music for free from record labels and publicists and that it takes free concert tickets. But "our opinions have not been swayed by the fact that we are receiving this music for free." Oh whatever; we know you're planning to build a gilded mansion with those spare craptastic CDs, GFP. (Also, call your mother, already.)

High-profile Valley blogger and former PR executive Louis Gray: Reminded readers he is now a consultant for Paladin Advisors Group, with clients like ReadBurner, SocialToo and BuzzGain, as disclosed in previous posts. Gray then noted that there is no easy way to attach disclosures to "likes" on blog systems and social networks, or shares on Google Reader. Thanks for giving us something fresh and unexpected to worry about. Thanks a lot.

Christine Koh of mommy blog Boston Mamas: Wrote about that the practices of some fellow mommy bloggers "depressed" her; reiterated her longtime commitment "to transparency and 100% advertorial-free editorial — but said she wouldn't be disclosing her material ties on a per-post basis as the FTC recommends because "I operate Boston Mamas more like a magazine" and have a clearly detailed editorial code.

The disclosure, buried on the "Contacts" page, foreswears advertorial but says Koh accepts free review units, "junkets" and "swag," including gift cards, which she insists do not influence her coverage. So theoretically she could accept a free trip to Monaco, a trillion dollar gift card and a necklace of opulent jewels to review, all from the same vendor, and then never disclose this fact to her readers in the post. In fact, that very scenario occurs weekly for Koh, probably.

NonSociety blogger Jordan Reid: Like her corporate overlord/protocelebrity mentor Julia Allison, Reid wants to stay out of trouble with the FTC. So she promised to let readers know when her parents buy her an awesome dinner at a four-star restaurant; promised to not completely fabricate posts; and to overshare absolutely "everything" that happens to her with "total and complete transparency." None of that really has anything to do with the FTC regulations, Jordan, but it's, uh, good to know, and we're sure your boss over there is proud.

Allison was an early pioneer in the fine art of internet attentionmongering, so it makes sense she's tried to establish a beachhead on disclosure. The NonSociety founder today apologetically issued a "so corporate" post to make sure everyone understood who has been paying her to say nice things about them:

• Blueprint Cleanse, which has been flushing things out of Allison's colon for "over a year."
  
• SeaWorld, whose payments Allison did not disclose until after we raised the issue.
  
• Sony, who gave Allison an unprecedentedly classy deal involving actual TV commercials.

We expect this will be the tip of the iceberg; FTC rules say that bloggers must disclose their "material relationships" with people they write about, including anyone who provides freebies or cash. If you see any other confessionals, email them in; we'll round up the blogger confessionals tomorrow.

(Top pic: One of Allison's Blueprint Cleanse endorsements. Via NonSociety.)

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)

The AdMob deal announced today is the third largest acquisition in Google's history, behind only DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.7 billion). But no one's really been talking about the mobile advertising network or its early-thirtysomething founder Omar Hamoui until now. Hamoui is downright anonymous.

Here's what we've learned about him based on his low internet profile and scant press clippings:

• Has all of 441 followers on Twitter. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, who sold his weblogging company for less than 1/20th as much, has 77,000 followers.
  
• 32 years old as of May.
  
• Earned a bachelor's in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles and dropped out of the MBA program at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
  
• Ran computer programming company Vertical Blue for almost four years.
  
• Senior program manager at Sony Pictures Digital, about two years.
  
• COO of startup called GoPix.
  
• Started HerBabyShower.com.
  
• Started FotoChatter, for sharing pictures between cell phones, but left the venture behind after becoming frustrated with the inefficiency of advertising his site to mobile users.
  
• Came up with AdMob as a solution to the FotoChatter advertising headaches while at Wharton, at age 28.
  
• In 2007, Bill Gates personally asked Omar Hamoui to speak at Microsoft's annual gathering of journalists, according to a July 207 Ad Age article. Gates had just bought one of Hamoui's competitors.
  
• Last year, toured Kara Swisher of All Things D through his cramped headquarters in San Mateo, a town on the San Francisco Peninsula not exactly famous as a startup hotbed. (See below).
  
• Google bought AdMob after attempting to launch a mobile ad network of its own (AdSense Mobile).

(Pic: Hamoui by Rodrigo SEPÚLVEDA SCHULZ )

Facebook approves every advertisement on its site. But it didn't notice a watermark on one racy ad's picture, identifying it, Forbes says, as one from Jailbaitgallery.com, where the users had guessed the age of the two girls in the photo to be approximately 16 years. Jailbait Gallery apparently specializes in those sorts of votes. Lovely.

The ad promoted alumni networking site MyLife.com, and, according to Forbes' Taylor Buley, "showed two apparently underage blondes in low-cut shirts." MyLife ads on Facebook's current ad board, like the one above, still feature racy female pictures, but presumably of adults: The MyLife executive in charge of affiliate marketers, like the one who took out the offending ad, told Forbes, "a very small fraction of 1% of [our marketing] traffic... would be promoting those kinds of images."

He added, unimpressively, "We've been trying to get our arms around the whole policing aspect." Uh, OK. But surely Facebook is swearing up and down this won't happen again? "A spokesman says copyright owners can fill out an online form and Facebook will take action within 24 hours."

Got that, underaged girls? The best way to keep your pictures from being abused on Facebook is to be sure you're constantly reloading Facebook, according to Facebook.

(Image: A different Facebook ad for MyLife.com, without the "Jailbaitgallery.com" logo and presumably featuring an adult model. Via Facebook.)

"DVD" Jon Lohansen has been tweaking Apple for years. After breaking the encryption on DVDs, he went on to unscramble Apple's music store files, then its wi-fi media streaming, then virtual locks within the iPhone. Now he's got his own company, doubleTwist, whose mission is to connect non-Apple devices to your iTunes library — the same sort of trick the Apple-baiters over at Palm recently tried and then apparently gave up on.

This ad, which inverts an iconic Macintosh ad by putting Jobs in the role of Big Brother, is sure to get plenty of publicity, just like the Apple store trick. Free press is, of course, far preferable to paid advertising. Any old hacker could figure that out; it takes a more clever one to actually pull it off.

Clearly meant to have a lively, "fun" feel, the painful video is so over-the-top bad we thought it first it must be a hoax. But Microsoft's in-house blogger has been touting these events, which are being organized by an apparently well-established marketing company that specializes in getting people to shill products to their friends at sketchy "house parties." Said marketing company owns the YouTube channel where this video appeared.

Microsoft has a track record of tone deaf commercials, but this marketing video somehow hits a new low. Maybe it's the way there's an undercurrent of tension and seething disdain even among the hired professional actors, as in this scene, about three minutes into the video:

Middle-aged white lady: I led an overview of some of my favorite Windows 7 features... It took, like, 10 minutes [approving murmurs]... It was totally, informal, like, everyone just kind of crowded around the computer in the kitchen [hearty laughter].

...After my overview, I went straight to an activity.

Older white lady: Oh, you went straight to the activity? I let everyone fool around with "Snap" [a Windows 7 feature] for a little while! [Uproarious laughter.]

Young black man: Me too! I did the same!

Middle aged white lady: I love Snap!

Older white lady: And then we started an activity maybe 30 minutes later.

Middle-aged white lady: Well, either way works, right? You figure out what your guests want, and play it by ear. In any event, we each did an activity, or two.

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): Uh I did three activities. Ya.

Middle-aged white lady: Oooooh.

Young black man: Well, excuse me. [Snickering laughter.]

Middle-aged white lady: That's great! [Laughter] The activities each have you talk for a minute or so, and then...

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): [Frowns, angrily slams down drink, walks over to get more food and stew in silent rage.]

Or maybe it's the way the video undercuts the very product it purports to be touting, by emphasizing the you should actually install Microsoft's operating system at least 48 hours before your... uh, install party. As in this scene:

Angry party-pooper geek guy (white): Of course the first thing you want to do is install Windows 7, right? [Boisterous, awkward laughter.] Now make sure you do that a couple of days in advance of the party. [Laughter silenced.] Call customer service if you have any questions. [Emphatically, this time, waving arms:] Got to play with Windows 7 before the party.

True. Nothing scotches an awesome Windows 7 party like catastrophic data loss, the Blue Screen of Death and impotent cursing. Person-to-person marketing might work for fun products like cosmetics, or cheap inoffensive gear like Tupperware. But operating system installs? Not fun, not trivial, and not the sort of thing that's going to liven up your kitchen. Device drivers? Crashes? Partitioning? Pass the tequila.

[via the Telegraph]

UPDATE: And of course, the parodies have already begun:

The Beacon breakup stems from a 2008 suit filed against Facebook in which users complained the site and Beacon were invading their privacy and ruining surprises, like engagements and holiday gifts. After much back-and-forth, Facebook previously agreed to let users turn off Beacon, but have now totally given up on the relationship. Instead they're announcing a new "multi-year, strategic alliance" deal with Nielsen:

Nielsen BrandLift, a release explained, is the first product created from the deal. It will use opt-in polls on Facebook's home page to gauge user sentiment around advertisements, measuring "aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration." It'll roll out in the U.S. to a number of test partners this week and to all advertisers over the next few months.

The effort will, they hope, help gauge users interests and then convince advertisers to spend more money on the site. Speaking of money, as part of the Beacon suit, Facebook has agreed to donate $9.5 million to create a privacy-advocacy group. And that group, we're sure, will keep detailed records on its members.

Image via pshab's flickr.

Though it's garnered $25 million in venture investment, HuffPo in January was making about one fourth the revenue of content competitor Salon.com, valued at just $700,000 by the public markets. This might explain why Eric Hippeau, the investor CEO recently installed to fix HuffPo's finances, has hired former Yahoo ad chief Greg Coleman as president and chief revenue officer, as reported by Kara Swisher of All Things . Coleman shoves aside, then, current Chief Revenue Office James Smith, who has been at HuffPo for nearly three years after stints at AOL and IAC.

We can't say that's a terrible move, given Smith's track record, but it's by no means a given that Coleman can go much further selling HuffPo's notoriously sketchy pageviews. But then he, too, has worked at AOL, known as much for its dodgy accounting and traffic-goosing as for its wholesome oxfords-and-khaki corporate uniform (Coleman remains a fan). So there's some hope.

The campaign consists of a Web video in which the woman, Karen26, tells a foreign lover — she doesn't remember his name — that she's had his baby and hasn't slept with anyone since he left town. Along the way, Karen26 promotes the national nightlife and tradition of "hygge," i.e. fucking random tourists. The Twittering hordes have, naturally, been all over this.

As AdLand notes, the contrived storyline is not very original, even for guerilla marketing, but the locals are none too happy with the implication that Denmark is filled with "loose women and unprotected sex," and the spot has been pulled. That's a smart move, albeit for the wrong reason: We'd be far less concerned with the honor of Danish women than with the practice of encouraging annoying tourists to be even more annoying by asking endless winking questions about "hygge." No bar would have been safe, Danish ladies.

[via AdRants]

Though they've always admitted they could possibly, maybe, potentially open the door to advertisers, Twitter founder Biz Stone seemed to chart a more definitive course yesterday afternoon when he tweeted, "We leave the door open for advertising. We'd like to keep our options open, as we've said before." Then, Twitter altered its terms of service, which now reads:

The services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the content or information on the services, queries made through the services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the services are subject to change."

In consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the services, you agree that Twitter and its third-party providers and partners may place such advertising on the services....

One can hardly be surprised, of course, for the two-year old site's growing like gangbusters and has even, like Google before it, created an entirely new verb.

But, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame points out, it's not always wise for a unique company such as Twitter to open the revenue flood gates, for poor performance can drive down the ultimate value:

...The problem is, once you have revenues it's impossible for [potential buyers] to just make stuff up. They look at those revenues and growth rates and trend out from there. They can't add a different long term growth rate without a solid reason to do it

So when Twitter talks about turning on revenue, it isn't such a small decision. They have no idea how much money they can make off the service....

It's not inconceivable that Twitter actually can't scale as a centralized service, and will stumble badly.

Others wonder whether companies will want to advertise on a site where people can express themselves in a manner, however lewd and crude, of their own choosing. Does Wal-Mart really want to be advertising alongside Courtney Love's insane ramblings? Probably not.

One big concern we would have, if we were Twitter, is how much staying power the site actually has (although the influx of sluts does bode well). One reader recently compared Twitter with CB radio. It is, they hypothesized, nothing but a fad. And that's entirely imaginable.

It's hard to say how long the world will tolerate communicating within the constraints of 140 characters. Although, with the way things are going now, we'll probably all be grunting and scratching ourselves, rather than actually conversing. So, Twitter, maybe you'll surprise us.

Attached is the ad Oracle ran in the lower right corner of today's Wall Street Journal. An early edition posted to the newspaper's website illustrates how Ellison likes to operate. Check out the highlighted bit — Oracle never bothered to fill in the data to support its certain conclusion. The attitude: "Definitely say we're way 'faster' on hardware from Sun, which we now own, than on IBM, which makes a competing database; we'll find some numbers later to prove it."

All tech moguls, to some extent, play this marketing game, but Ellison has historically been an especially egregious example; his brazenness, in fact, helps explain why Oracle, through a series of mergers, has come to utterly dominate the market for the most complex types of large corporate software.

An example: Ellison in the late 1980s commissioned an ad to tout a hugely complex clustering feature for Oracle database software — and did so before one line of code had been written to support that feature. This according to Mike Wilson's biography of Ellison:

About 1987 word got out that the Ingres database would soon have a sexy new function: It would be able to do distributed queries... Ellison told [Oracle ad man Rick] Bennett to prepare an advertisement announcing Oracle's distributed capability. Then he assigned an engineer to whip up a distribtued feature so the company would actually have something to sell when the ad appeared. Ten days later Bennett's advertisement hit the trade press: "Oracle Announced SQL*Star," it said. "The First Distribtued Relational DBMS..."

"The fact of the matter was Oracle didn't have anything," said George Schussel, the trade show promoter who had followed Oracle from the beginning. "But that was the way they worked. Everything was marketing, everything was image. You simply announced the product and then figured out later how to deal with it from a technological point of view."

Another time, Wilson writes, Oracle took out an ad implying, outlandishly, it had ported a competing database to the PC from mainframes — "IBM SQL/DS AND DB2 DBMS NOW ON PC," read the ad headline. Ellison "exploded" when an engineer challenged the ad, Oracle vet Kirk Bradley told Wilson:

"He said, 'All companies do this. It's standard stuff. You don't know anything about business.'"

It's somehow comforting to know that, while hot companies like Twitter, Google and Netscape may come and go, some longtime CEOs basically haven't changed for decades. Larry Ellison will always be a shameless truth-bender. Just like some of his closest friends.

UPDATE: One commenter supposes, quite plausibly, "They're going to announce the results at OpenWorld on Oct 14 and we're all supposed to tune in then to find out what XX equals." So maybe Oracle is doing the same fill-in-the-blanks thing it's always done, just in a very open and shameless way. Transparency. People do change!

UPDATE 2: Oracle has been fined over this ad, since Oracle did not possess any TPC benchmarks to back up the ads claim. Oracle was, again, hoping the facts would fit the claim, when said facts came into existence, which at the time of this ad they had not.

The company's banner ads featured buxom women never seen in the game, a gimmick Evony admitted to launching strictly for "marketing purposes." Videogame marketer Bruce Everiss turned up a pile of evidence of other misdeeds after Evony apparently spammed his blog. Everiss wrote that Evony was built with stolen graphics, content and design; that it was owned by a man, Eric Lam, sued by Microsoft for click fraud and that it is presently gaming Google AdSense.

Evony's attorneys have threatened Everiss with a lawsuit; they've also issued a legal complaint to the U.K. Guardian for asking if Evony had "become the most despised game on the web." Lam, a Chinese businessman, would have more luck with a softer touch and eye toward redemption. There's no reason a business built from roots in seedy industries can't legitimize itself with the right attitude. Just ask MySpace founders — and former spam, porn, and instant-weight-loss moguls — Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson!

It's still easy to sneer at Allison as an overreaching wantrepreneur; her NonSociety made all of $60,000 last year and lost one of its three partners this year. It replaced an option from NBC's national network, Bravo, with a deal involving NBC's local lifestyle cable channel, a much smaller venue. And Allison's Time Out New York column ended — so when Sony calls her a "columnist and Web celebrity" it's a bit of a stretch.

But Allison has come a long way from selling Dunkin' Donuts product placement on her blog and pimpage in Herald Square, and from getting paid to blog about a cheesy trip to Sea World. In the pantheon of brands Allison has been closely associated with — AM New York, Star magazine, Dunkin' Donuts, Sea World, New York Nonstop, etc. — Sony is easily the most distinguished. And the electronics company is putting her in good company, alongside writer Amy Sedaris, singer Justin Timberlake and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. Via national TV commercials, radio, print and online ads and retail display, Sony will hawk...

...the BRAVIA television line, Blu-ray Disc home entertainment, Cyber-shot digital cameras, alpha digital SLR cameras, Handycam camcorders and Sony professional high-definition camera systems, VAIO notebook computers and Sony Reader digital books

Allison is more of a Macbook and Canon and Kodak and iPhone/Kindle kind of girl. But if Sony — last real hit: PlayStation 2 — wants to connect with the Facebooking, Apple-loving young masses, it has to start somewhere, and spokespeople like Allison and America's Next Top Model judge Nigel Barker are clearly meant to help endear the company to the tech-savvy, style-conscious younger women Sony thinks should be buying its products.

So while reality television might be an saturated market, Alllison and her agents at ICM have stumbled onto a new opportunity for lifecasters, in a down market no less: Lending flailing tech companies a distinctly Webby buzz they hope to deploy against cooler rivals. For this, Julia Allison the crossover protocelebrity deserves her due. Now Julia Allison the aspiring Web media mogul has to finally show how her uniquely relentless brand of self-promotion can actually power a company (NonSociety) that offers long-term value to people other than herself. There will be, it is safe to say, plenty of people watching.

[via AllThingsD]

CocoPerez.com has been exposed in dribs and drabs; the website Evil Beet snuck past its password protection, then the website became freely available for maybe half an hour, now it's back to being password protected.

The site is meant to be more advertiser-friendly, and consequently finds Hilton doodling fewer crude captions on pictures. But his nasty side shows through sometimes, as in this caption:

Then there's this sarcastic headline, complete with Hilton's trademark double exclamation points:

But there's also analytical rigor! Evil Beet noticed that Hilton has been reposting items written for his old site, expanded with more "analysis." Below is a post about Harvard University's obnoxious new clothing line. On PerezHilton.com, the coverage ended with, "This is all fine and well, but there is one lingering question… why???" On CocoPerez.com, it ends,

This is all fine and well, but there is one lingering question: why?? This is from so far left field. We would understand if The New School or RISD or any number of artistic/fashion focused schools launched a line - it would still be unusual but at least a logical progression. But this?? This is just so random. Especially since Harvard isn't exactly thought of as the apex of fashion. This is like Janet Reno announcing she's launching a line of lingerie. You just can't get your head around it because it's so…bizarre.

Well, at least they've got our attention!

It is for this value-added piercing insight that the new site is apparently sponsored by Gap. We'd be surprised if many more sugar daddies sign on: Hilton's biggest advantage has been that he'll say anything, no matter how tasteless. But now he wants to make bank by playing nice, leading to muddles like CocoPerez.

Izea, you'll recall, is the company that paid llifecaster Julia Allison, with real actual money, to blog about a free trip to Sea World. Not satisfied merely to pimp out bloggers, the firm has set its sights on the burgeoning field of tweeting. The company's announcement, passed along by Mashable, leads one to believe there's a big payoff for promoting Izea's clients; here is the screen Izea shows prospective Tweeters, set at $100 per 140-character tweet:

Mashable had its screen configured for $150 per tweet. We took the bait and clicked through to the signup screen for our personal Twitter account. Reality was bleak, with Izea suggesting an asking price of $1.50 per tweet, based on our usage stats.

For what it's worth, taking part in this sort of shilling doesn't seem to be a barrier to working with national news networks. Allison wrote paid blog posts for Armani Exchange July 17 but went on MSNBC as a pundit at least twice within the following week. Tech blogger Chris Pirillo is listed prominently as an Izea client and has his own show on CNN.com.

Of course, you're supposed to disclose your ties to Izea, which means you'll probably lose a lot of followers. Plus it will get progressively harder to look at yourself in the mirror each morning. But at, like, $4 per word, you can at least pretend you're a real writer.

(Pic: Allison, from her sponsored Armani post. As far as we know, she has yet to rent out access to her Twitter.)