So it seems public relations firm Edelman has been shipping Vista pre-loaded Acer Ferrari laptops to top bloggers (including Brandon LeBlanc, Scott Beale, Mauricio Freitas, Mitch Denny, Barb Bowman and Zen.Hevengames) on behalf of their client Microsoft.

Cue mayhem - with irate readers of some of those blogs going balubas and claiming that the bloggers had committed some ethical transgression by accepting the laptops, which had been descibed as “presents” with “no strings attached”. Flaming comments included threats to refuse to ever again read the offending blogs, accusations of being shills for Microsoft, etc.

Eventually this led to a response I found here from a Vista project leader:

All,

Let me take a minute to respond to some of these comments. Yes, Windows Vista and AMD sent out review computers to bloggers. Why? Because we believe in the power of community, we believe in our product, and we are partnering with AMD to give bloggers the best hardware experience we can.

I understand the concerns on ethics, and I share them. We have been up front that these are review pcs, and we encourage bloggers to disclose that. Here’s the language we used in the review outreach[*]:

“Full disclosure - while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away on your site, or you can keep it. My recommendation is that you give it away on your site.”

I hope this information helps. We want to be fully transparent about what we are doing here.

Aaron Coldiron, Windows Vista

So did you get your $2,300 Acer? If not, why not? Did any Irish bloggers? Don’t bother poor Piaras at Edelman Dublin, by the way - Edelman doesn’t handle MSFT in Ireland these days.

It does also make you wonder about the ethics of bloggers, and whether the appropriate standard is being used.

The Gold Standard must be the Wall Street Journal. When I was PRing in New York I remember having a conversation with a telecoms reporter that people at WSJ weren’t allowed to accept so much as a cup of coffee.

The question is whether bloggers should be held to that standard, and whether it’s a huge transgression.

Technology and travel articles - does it invalidate the coverage if the reporter hasn’t paid for the flight? What about political reporters travelling with a candidate and accepting the food on offer? I’m just saying it might be possible for the online jihadis to get out of hand on this topic. If you’re secretly taking stuff from big corporates, don’t tell anyone about it and flame their competitors, that’d be one thing. For the most part, these guys have been pretty open about the fact that they didn’t solicit the gear and that they were reviewing it. Transparency seems a pretty good standard, and one that’s realistic.

There must be other things to get upset about - like not getting a laptop from AMD/Edelman/Microsoft, say.

And after all, are you going to wait until your average blogger trades up to a model that’ll ship with Vista to get in reviews?

* The ‘review outreach’ idea of giving it away or returning it was new to many of the bloggers who got the notice they were about to get a nice new laptop…