As most of you know, it’s been widely reported that Microsoft has long been “buying” favorable reviews by sending along new versions of Windows installed on powerful note-books to certain tech bloggers. It’s the sort of thing, of course, that you know but can’t always confirm, since it’s not as if a reviewer is going to boast that he or she received a bribe for touting the product or service in question.

Well, this is only a microcosm of what Advertising Age has called “Blogger Payola,” and it extends to a whole range of endorsements not just from online writers but celebrities as well, particularly when done on social sites, such as Twitter. In response, the FTC has issued a new set of tough guidelines about such unethical behavior.

What this basically means is that these endorsements or testimonials must be accompanied by full disclosure as to whether there’s some sort of commercial relationship  between the company and the blogger or celebrity.

In our corner of the universe, it would mean that if a tech writer took a spiff from Microsoft to give them high fives, that fact must be revealed or the offender may face a fine. On Twitter, when a movie star says they just love Diet Coke, they have to tell you if they got paid for that endorsement. Unfortunately, the edict is sufficiently unclear that it may require n explicit disclosure for each and every post, not just something buried in the fine print on a site’s footer. But how would that work within the 144 character limit of Twitter?

How this would be enforced is anyone’s guess. It is restricted to the U.S., and it’s not as if the government will attempt to use the Patriot Act to monitor confidential communications between a tech company and the reviewer in question, nor eavesdrop on the lunch meeting between an agent and a celebrity on their latest endorsement deal. The hope is that this will serve as a deterrent to ongoing abusive conduct.

Now I suspect lots of you have long felt that favorable reviews on ad-supported publications have always been influenced by advertising. That’s one of the reasons that Consumer Reports has prospered, because they buy everything they test at normal retail outlets and do not accept advertising.

But that view is a bit too simplistic. A responsible publisher is going to find a way to firewall the advertising and editorial departments. When I wrote for Macworld, for example, I was informed early on that the writers never talked to the ad sales people. We were expected to be honest in our reviews and features, and back up what we say with facts. I never, ever heard from anyone asking or hinting that I should favor one product over another because it would impact ad revenue. When I submitted articles, the editorial comments and corrections were designed to improve the presentation. Nothing more nothing less.

Indeed, in one case, when I reviewed an Apple note-book, my editor at the time suggested that I actually reduce the “mice” rating because my conclusions clearly merited the change.

But what about getting free stuff?

All right, here’s the deal: For software, reviewers generally receive an NFR (Not For Resale) user license or retail boxed copy. You get to keep the product, of course, but nobody forces you to keep using it after the review process is over. Believe me, I removed lots of apps once the article was submitted, because, as the articles clearly expressed, I wasn’t pleased with the product and couldn’t recommend it.

Hardware is a different story. Apple used to send out iPods and let the reviewers keep them, but everything else has a return date, usually two weeks to a month. They will sometimes grant you an extension if that’s not sufficient to complete the review. For example, when I received a first generation iPhone, I was given a two week limit. However, Apple released a software update near the end of the process, so I requested an extension and was granted an additional two weeks. As far as Apple is concerned, if you don’t return the products in a timely fashion, forget about getting any further equipment loans.

Other companies may be more lax about the process, but most will expect to see the hardware back at some point in time. So in the normal course of events, there’s not a whole lot of incentive for a writer to favor one product over another. Having had dozens of boxes in my home office at times, the process of caring for all of them — and not accidentally mixing parts from one with another — can be downright annoying. It’s the price you pay for getting involved in the hardware review process.

Here at The Mac Night Owl, we’re a small company, and I sometimes have to play several roles, so I have devised a mental firewall to deal with the advertising versus editorial content dilemma. But I still apply the very same standards, and I’m certain most online publications do as well.

As far the exceptions, whether they got paid off to favor Microsoft or another company, they have to think about the harm they’ve done to their reputations by selling out.

I have to wonder just what Apple is thinking by not coming to an agreement with Adobe over putting Flash on the iPhone. Just this week, Adobe has announced a new version of Flash, version 10.1, which will support loads of smartphone platforms. The press release mentions upcoming support for Palm’s WebOS, Google Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and even Research in Motion.

Nowhere does Adobe mention Apple or the iPhone.

Now it’s a sure thing Steve Jobs has been quite skeptical of Flash. He pointed early on to the inferior performance of the existing mobile version and voiced concerns about excessive battery use. Not mentioned, of course, is the fact that Flash is probably the number one (with a bullet) cause of browser-related crashes.

Yes, you could tell Web developers to simply stop using Flash and look for other ways to embed multimedia content, but the reality isn’t so easily handled. There are literally millions of those sites around the world, and every single one of them will fail to render properly on an iPhone and iPod touch.

We’ve recently removed all the Flash-based navigation bars on our sites except for the one devoted to the science fiction novel, “Attack of the Rockoids.” There hasn’t been enough time to rejigger that site to drop the Flash content, which includes a special video introduction when you first access the site.

However, even our other sites aren’t entirely free of Flash. Our forums are configured to let you embed multimedia, from YouTube and dozens of other sources. But they arrive requiring Flash, and thus you can’t view them yet on your iPhone. Worse, it doesn’t seem as if there will be an early resolution to that dilemma.

For its own smartphone platform, Apple has worked with Google to provide an alternate method of viewing YouTube content, using the industry-standard H.264 video codec that’s part of QuickTime. It does quite well.

Indeed, here is where Apple on the one hand, and Adobe and Microsoft on the other, remain far, far apart. Microsoft is notorious for wanting to enforce its own proprietary standards upon the industry, standards that, in many cases, would allow them to collect royalties. This is part and parcel of their ongoing efforts to control digital content. Adobe wants you to use Flash and its other standards, although some, such as PDF, have become open protocols.

While Apple is often accused of the very same nefarious behavior, in large part they are dealing with technologies that are available to any tech company. QuickTime is an amalgam of industry standards and Mac OS X puts a proprietary graphical interface and other features atop a rich selection of open source software. WebKit, the rendering engine for iTunes and Safari, is also used by lots of third parties. Even Google’s Chrome browser uses WebKit.

But that doesn’t change the dilemma that Apple is going to have to confront sooner or later. Failing to provide Flash support on the most popular smartphone browser platform not he planet may have a solid basis. It could very well be that Steve Jobs was quite correct about the shortcomings of Flash’s mobile platform, although one might hope that most of those concerns are being addressed in the new version just announced by Adobe.

But that doesn’t mean that you and I should suffer as a result. Why should it be necessary to avoid Flash-based sites, or see them with reduced compatibility and lots of missing parts just because Apple and Adobe can’t find a way to make the technology function reliably? That’s their fault, not mine, not yours.

Sure there may be plenty of blame to share among all the offenders for this silly situation. There may indeed by various and sundry technological hurdles that need to be overcome before Flash can run acceptably on the iPhone platform without hurting compatibility, security and even battery life. However, both Apple and Adobe have lots of supremely talented software engineers that, if put to work, ought to be able to address the problem in a way that satisfies all of the concerns voiced by Steve Jobs.

In the meantime, I suppose there’s not much you and I can do — except perhaps to submit lots of feedback to the two companies asking them to work out their differences and resolve the Flash dilemma forthwith.

The prospects of encouraging or forcing Web designers to give up their affections for Flash are next to nil. It’s not fair to them or to the visitors to their sites who have to endure this unfortunate state of affairs

Sure, I suppose it’s also possible to just insist that people who want to view Flash-based content simply not do it on an iPhone or iPod touch and be done with it. That may seem an all-too-convenient solution. But it’s not one that seems reasonable.

It doesn’t matter to me whether Flash is good, bad, or just prevalent. I’d like to see Flash content on my iPhone and I don’t care what these companies have to do to make it so. What’s more, to make matters even more confusing, this article from TechCrunch seems to hold out hope that Flash can be used by developers to build iPhone apps, though Adobe is clearly not taking the next step, which is direct support for Flash on the iPhone.

Let me put all this in perspective. When I first began to use a Mac in the 1980s, it was difficult to work a full day without having a system crash. Indeed, I remember setting up a new Mac IIcx at my home office back in 1989, and having it freeze within 15 minutes after the initial boot. That was before I launched a single application, so the computer was idle when it happened.

Now I can’t say all of my Mac experiences were that bad and, in fact, the version of System 6 I was soon replaced by a later one, which proved noticeably more stable.

In the 1990s, the Mac OS was really becoming long in the tooth fast. The move to System 7, in 1991, was supposed to herald a new era of color support and ease of use. But you’d easily hit the rough spots, although the Restart button in the crash warning prompt would sometimes work for once.

It’s fascinating, in retrospect, to see Microsoft using the “System 7? label at times to refer to Windows 7, as if the very mention of Windows was itself a negative. Strange, though, that they’d crib the name of a Mac OS version that was distinctive only in encouraging Apple that it was time to move on and develop a truly industrial-strength operating system.

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When I used the term Psycho Talk in a recent article to describe the crazy claims made by Microsoft sycophants, I had a feeling that I severely understated the problem. The particular tech writer I criticized in that piece has since come out and struggled to explain why the iPhone is, first, not as popular as we’re led to believe, and, second, primarily a U.S. phenomenon. He evidently doesn’t realize that the iPhone is available in dozens of countries, and does quite well sales wise in many of them.

Such ignorance would be forgivable if it wasn’t repeated over and over again by the very same offenders. I mean you can expect Microsoft to want to spin the news their way, but even that’s becoming increasingly difficult. In a recently-published interview, for example, CEO Steve Ballmer waxed more incoherent than ever, and that’s saying an awful lot.

But rather than believe me about Ballmer’s irrational behavior, I suggest you read a three-part interview posted over at TechCrunch. It’s highly unfortunate that the publication didn’t really ask Ballmer the hard questions or follow up when he made a particularly foolish statement.

Take the claim that the market share of the Google Chrome and Safari browsers can be considered “rounding errors.” Now according to the September 2009 usage stats, Safari has 3.82% and Chrome 2.44%, and that’s no rounding error by anyone’s rule-book. Worse, Ballmer seems to believe that Internet Explorer’s current share is some 74%, which leads me to conclude that his math skills are seriously deficient. In fact, the most recent “median” survey gives Internet Explorer 64.66% of the browser market.

Now in all fairness, maybe Ballmer is only counting the stats at his company’s site, and ignoring everything else. But since he was never questioned about the source of his alleged data, we can only guess. I’ll go with the lack of usable math skills, since Microsoft has squandered so much money on failed projects, such as the Zune digital media player. They’ve also spent billions developing Internet Explorer, which remains a third-rate browser, with performance benchmarks way below just about everything else.

Even the new Bing search engine, after gaining a few points against Google early on, appears to be suffering from a case of buyer’s remorse. The latest StatCounter ratings show that Google is back above 80%, precisely where it was before Bing’s debut. In addition, Yahoo!, which is destined to incorporate Bing when that deal with Microsoft concludes, also lost share. I’ve long felt that any deal between these two companies would, at first, benefit Google, because of the time wasted searching for synergies, so enough resources won’t be devoted to actually improving their search engines and getting more users.

To add insult to injury, it’s by no means certain that this deal, which I label Ya-Bing!, will actually pass muster from the antitrust people in the U.S. and the European Union. Even if the U.S. authorities give the go-ahead, the EU has no love lost for Microsoft, and they’ll examine every nuance of the contracts with a fine tooth comb. Even if they alao approve the pact, they might also mandate some contract changes.

After all is said and done, the entire process will drag on until next year at the earliest. While both Microsoft and Yahoo! claim to be proceeding as if it’s a done deal, implementing Bing with, one expects, some Yahoo! technology, won’t be walk in the park. There are apt to be some trying periods until expected glitches are resolved.

While all this is going on, Google will just keep getting better and better, and don’t be surprised if they actually gain a larger piece of the pie as a result. Talk about laughing to the bank.

In the meantime, Ballmer will continue to fret over attacks from the “high end,” which is what he calls Apple, or attacks from the side, which is where he puts Chrome, Firefox and the other alternative browsers. Such rantings almost resemble the concept of thrust and parry in sword fighting. So maybe that’s it! Steve Ballmer things he is actually involved in a battle with dueling blades, not to preserve the market share of Microsoft’s products and services.

Now when it comes to the operating system wars, Microsoft has taken to referring to Windows 7 as “System 7,” perhaps in another lame attempt to remove the Windows connotation. This is, I suppose, another Microsoft attempt at innovation, but don’t they realize that the most familiar concept of a System 7 was an early version of the Mac OS, released back in 1991?

You have to wonder how Microsoft has deluded itself to believe that cribbing the name of an 18-year-old operating system that was rather buggy, I recall, is somehow going to ensure that Windows 7 will somehow prosper as a result. The very idea is absurd, but I’m even more concerned about the band of Redmond-following media pundits who are lining up behind Microsoft to present this Vista refresh as the second coming.

Yes, it’s a wacky world out there, and not just on extremist political talk shows. Microsoft is sure doing its best to confuse and befuddle the masses and I trust their efforts will be doomed to failure.