A Shorthand For Disclosure: What Type Is This?

Years ago, on my first blog, I typed the various styles of email formats used by businesses. Type 1 was “firstnamelastname@company.com”, type 2 was “lastnamefirstname@company.com”, type 3 was “firstname_lastname@company.com”, and so on. I came up with a long list, as I recall, but the purpose was to simplfy life, so an individual or company could simply say “we use type 6 email format,” and that would be that. (Of course, this was before spam had become such a headache.)

Today, in the interests of simplifying my own life, I am creating another list of types, but in this case they are types or degrees of advisory relationship I have with various companies. As an advisory capitalist, I am developing a portfolio of companies with which I have various sorts of relationships, and I would like to streamline and memorialize my disclosures, at the same time.

• Type 0 - No advisory relationship, no financial interest.
• Type 1 - No advisory relationship, financial interest.
• Type 2 - Informal advisory relationship, no financial interest.
• Type 3 - Formal advisory relationship, no financial interest.
• Type 4 - Formal advisory relationship, financial interest.

Type 0 is the baseline case: no relationship or interest. Type 1 is the situation that might exist if I bought stock in a company. Types 2-4 represent the various flavors of advisory relationship that might represent some sort of conflict of interest that I — or some other blogger — might want to disclose in a post.

I intend to tag my disclosures in this way at Technorati, so anyone can look up all of my disclosures, or just my Type 4 disclosures, and find all the associated links. At least from this point forward.