So this week I am going to toot my own horn a tiny bit, but please bear with me because it’s a bit rusty.

A few weeks ago I created a post on one of my old blogs. Soon after, I submitted it to one of my favorite social sharing sites StumbleUpon. The next day something strange happened. Traffic on the site shot up to over 1,500. The next day traffic hovered at around 1,000 and then the following day shot back up to around 1,500. I was happy at this point for what seemed like a modest increase in traffic for a blog that generally gets around 75 to a 100 visitors a day.

And then the floodgates opened.

Unless Cap ‘N Crunch can start hawking carrot sticks, this popular advertising icon may have to sail off into the sunset in the near future. The FTC is proposing a new set of guidelines for food advertising aimed at children and there’s no tolerance for anything sugary, fatty or fun.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is quoted as saying,

“Children are strongly influenced by the foods they see advertised on television and elsewhere. Creating a food marketing environment that supports, rather than undermines, the efforts of parents to encourage healthy eating among children will have a significant impact on reducing the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic.  These new Principles will help food and beverage companies use their creativity and resources to strengthen parents’ efforts to encourage their children to make healthy choices.”

In the content farm news as of late the focus has been squarely on Demand Media. The most likely reason is that it is now a public company who has had a very public battle as its Google traffic and stock price have had their challenges.

Well, long before the financial coming out party of the content world’s dirty little secret (that secret being that content and quality often never danced together but still benefited from great search rankings) there was Demand Media’s partner in content crime, Associated Content that was bought by Yahoo. Rather than go public they took $100 million from the Internet’s once bright star Yahoo last May.