The Mobile Marketing Association has released the latest edition of its "consumer best practices guidelines for cross-carrier mobile content services in the U.S."

Although that sounds like a mouthful, at least 500 member companies follow these practices today. For example, Microsoft did so when it launched advertising on its mobile MSN.com property Monday.

Unlike with other media, mobile allows ads to be portrayed in several ways, including text messages or banner ads on mobile Web sites.

These new guidelines appear to cover the ever increasing number of techniques.
They include free-to-end-user guidelines for messaging, sweepstakes and contests, mobile Web and interactive voice response, affiliate marketing, participation TV and word-of-mouth verification.

Hard to know what some of that stuff even is, but this all comes under the heading of self-regulation. The committee that comes up with these guidelines comprises Alltel Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Bango, Chapell & Associates, denuo Group (a Publicis company), Jamster, Lavalife Mobile, mBlox, MMA, MTV Networks, MX Telecom, NeuStar, Qmobile, SinglePoint, Sprint Nextel, Sybase 365, Telescope, Teligence, The Walt Disney Company, T-Mobile USA, VeriSign, and Verizon Wireless.

The guidelines can be downloaded here.