• by Shankar Gupta , October 12, 2006

Following the lead of many of the businesses it oversees, the Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday that it has launched a blog.

The blog will be devoted to news of the upcoming public hearings, "Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-Ade," slated to begin Nov. 6. The Tech-Ade hearing is focused on how upcoming demographic, business practices and technological changes will affect consumers.

The blogs will largely feature interviews from experts on those topics, along with the occasional guest-blogger. The blog's author posted that the blog will enable the FTC to update the public on the three-day hearings, while also bringing information to a broader audience than those that will be present in person.

To find an author for the blog, the FTC went to one of its younger employees--a recent college graduate and a member of the FTC Honors Paralegal Program, with the Bureau of Consumer Protection. The employee's name will not be disclosed at this time, a spokeswoman for the FTC said.

In an inaugural post dated Oct. 5, the author also wrote that the initiative allows the FTC to road test blogging. "Our use of the blog is a way for the agency to experiment first hand with a communications tool that has grown in popularity over the past few years and may well become even more prevalent in the next Tech-ade," the author wrote.