There’s been a tremendous amount of chatter in the past week about the new Federal Trade Commission’s decision to impose new rules governing product endorsements on the Web.

As you’ve surely read, the FTC has announced that bloggers who review products must disclose whether they have any “material connection” to advertisers. That includes any payments or free products they get from companies. The rules (also for users of Twitter and Facebook) take effect Dec. 1 and carry a hefty ($11K) fine.

Some people applaud the ruling, such as Abraham Harrison who are “are thrilled with the new FTC endorsements guidelines and the strengthened transparency, honesty, and accountability these rules are bringing to the world of marketing.” So is Andy Sernovitz over at SmartBlog On Social Media.

Some people? Not so much. Take, for example, Jay Yarow of BusinessInsider who wrote, The FTC’s Blogger-Disclosure Plan Is Ludicrous, Unnecessary, And Unenforceable or Jeff Jarvis who worries about unintended consequences over at Buzz Machine. Or John Furrier who wrote Why Matt Cutts is Wrong on the FTC Rules suggesting that the guidelines are vague and will stifle innovation.

Wherever you fall on the issue, you can bet there were a lot of opinions – hence, a lot of data to mine.

Yay! And that’s where I come in.

So this is a theme cloud of the 4,066 results since October 1 with 75% of those results coming in the past 3 days.

Is it me or is it just fascinating?

It’s clear that the ruling is being talked about with respect to its effect on blogs way more than its effect on Facebook and Twitter. But those are talked about, too. And what you can’t see from this cloud (but I have geeky graphs to prove it) is that more than half the discussion is on Twitter at 2,399.

But what the heck is don on the cloud for?

~Wendy