Phew, I almost missed the boat on that one... I had no idea!!

What kind of disclosure do bloggers have to put on their blog entries when they have referral links? Can they say "This post may contain affiliate links from our advertising partners" and not actually state who the partners are?

Yes and no.

If there's a direct in-line link to who they are, I believe they are covered

AFAIK the FTC is okay with that approach as are the CC affiliates.

What about Amazon links? I was just curious if that was any different than CC referral links.

Amazon does not care if you mention them. In that sense it is different than the CC companies. And I doubt the FTC would care either based on what I remember of the guidance doc.

I haven't been over there in a while and decided to visit and click on a couple of threads. I guess there is no minimum posting requirements for the bloggers there? I happened to click on Flying with Fish and except for one post on Santa Claus in December he hasn't posted in nearly a year, Why is the blog still there? Looking at others it seems they go a long time between posts and looking further have no comments, at all.

I may have asked this before but does anyone ever get purged from BA?

As an aside I haven't seen Gary's blog in a while. I was under the impression that the term "Thought Leader" was something a poster here decided to call him. I didn't realize that Gary proclaimed himself the Thought Leader.

Very rarely.

Doesn't cost anything substantial to keep the old content around and it arguably helps a smidgen with SEO.

All of us thought leaders are self selected! :D ^

I do enjoy reading your thought leadery posts. Very thought leaderish

A BA blog very recently posted how you can get Hilton Gold if you were an Accenture employee. Unless the blog was targeting employees of that company, I always thought that this goes a bit too far. But hey, whatever brings clicks/pageviews/$

My 2c, not worth digging through the turds to get to the gems in BA. Not the colossus it used to be years ago.

I agree and only go directly to the few remaining blogs I read that are on BA. I'm sure our opinions will be negated when someone comes here and posts the Alexa numbers.

At least "The Reward Bo$$" has dropped off - he was by far the most ethically challenged.