Oh, come on… I’m not the only one who thought Alice Krige was the perfect choice to play the Borg Queen, right?

Too many folks have got themselves a bit off-kilter of late at this idea of ethics in the “blogosphere” (gawd, how I hate that word with a passion).

I have a slightly unique perspective on this, as I was trained for and for a short time worked as a so-called professional journalist before switching careers into IT, so indulge me for this post if you will.

Unlike some of my former profession, I do not think “professional” journalists are infallible, nor do I think all bloggers are rank amateurs and advertise about it on a blog, naturally. In fact, I’m quite in agreement that so-called professional journalists have been letting us down for quite some time in the ethics and accuracy departments. I actually am ashamed at some of the people I at one point aspired to be like when I was in J-school — ashamed at the depths of which they would lower themselves to in order to get a story, ashamed at the insensitivity they have to the subjects they write about, and ashamed that most of them would sell their soul and that of their parents to be the next Woodward and Bernstein.

Why is this all coming to a head lately? I think it has something to do with the fact that traditional media has been bleeding red numbers since well before the first dot-com-bomb, and continues to dive despite desperate attempts to recover it. When your very survival is at stake — when you’re literally watching your future’s end unfold before you, ethics can and usually will take a back seat to all but the very strongest of us, blogger or journalist alike.

Bloggers are not innocent flowers, either, as I’ve covered before here. I think some don’t really realize the power they command at a pithy stroke of the keyboard. However, I don’t think we need full-on organized codes of conduct, either. We can boil it down to two very, very simple concepts:

1. Be honest.
2. Be absent of malice.

You can go a long way in this world with just those two ideas in your pocket, although it does close off a few choices of profession (sorry ambulance chasers).

You don’t need full-on professional reviewer’s standards and conduct certifications to be a blogger. You don’t need to be a journalist to have old-fashioned journalism ethics (as opposed to this watered-down slush the profession calls ethics these days — CBS News, I’m looking at you). We don’t need to feed the trolls of the fake outrage, and we certainly don’t need to resort to name calling, do we really?

Oh, wait, this is the Internet — of course we have to resort to name calling. I must be new here. Silly me.

If you’re going to take free/discounted things from companies and review them, then congratulations on being one of the lucky ones. The only thing is to be honest about it. Say where you got it from and how it came to be. In the end, after that, it really isn’t a big deal.

Simple, right?

Why does it seem so hard for everyone else?

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