2009, sadly, has so far been the year that parenting bloggers were–often unfairly–vilified in the media. With talk of “blogola,” pay for play, shady review blogs, PR blackouts, and the grossly false assertion by the WSJ blog that the FTC is “considering new rules for parent bloggers,” you’d think that we were all a bunch of hustlers, whores, and naive housewives who left our professional skills, advanced degrees, and ethical backbones at the hospital with our placentas.

It’s just not true.

The vast, vast majority in this community (including plenty who’ve been mentioned in the press, by the way) have steel-strong ethics, unwavering integrity, and a continued commitment to the authenticity that is one of the original hallmarks of blogging.

So we’re taking our community back.

Over email and twitter over the past several months, I’ve been having the most spectacular conversations with Susan Getgood, Kristen Chase, and Julie Marsh. We all write very different kinds of personal blogs, and we all have a toe (or several) in marketing. But one of the things that we agree on is that we are, by and large, proud of how the parenting blogger community – and the blogging community in general – conducts itself.

And so we’ve put together Blog with Integrity, a voluntary pledge, complete with blog badge, for any and all bloggers (not just parents) who want a way to show their readers, marketers, the PR community, and certainly the press, that we are committed to integrity, responsibility and disclosure, and that a few bad apples do not speak for all of us. Not even close.

We may not have editors that we’re accountable to, but we do have each other.

I really hope you’ll sign.