Online green retailer BayingHound contacted us last week to tell us about a SIGG return program they had launched to offer discounts for SIGG bottles folks wanted to exchange for alternative brands.

BayingHound has been offering 40% discounts on new water bottles if you return SIGG bottles to them, and are also offering a 20% discount to anyone using the code NOTASIGG. The offer is good through October 1, and they've taken out an ad in the ZRecs Guide to promote the offer, where many of our readers end up browsing when they're shopping for safer children's products.

Shop owner and mom (to a four-year-old) Rachel Tayse Baillieul started Baying Hound in 2006 "to promote eco conscious consumerism based on our desire to find safe goods for our daughter," and stocks her shop with a variety of greener products, including a wide range of stainless steel water bottles - Earthlust, Klean Kanteen, Thinksport, Nathan, Guyot Designs, Blue Q (a brand we hadn't even heard of!) - as well as the super-clever ceramic Not A Paper Cup.

BayingHound is the first paid advertiser in the ZRecs Guide, something we'd like to see more of to help offset our costs and provide some return on investment for the intensive research we do to maintain our directory.

We have another advertiser lined up for an ad to go up next week - in this case, bottle brand Thinksport, who also generously contributed five bottles in our latest newsletter giveaway, which subscribers can still enter until the end of the day. Our plan for advertising in the guide is to allow any brand selling products we consider to be safe, and any retailer who specializes in safer products, to advertise there.

More on that in a coming post. In the meantime, if you are interested in advertising in the ZRecs Guide for your product, brand, or online retail shop to reach a highly targeted group of consumers looking for immediate purchasing options for safer childrens' products, email us at zrecsmedia@gmail.com and we can provide advertising rates and ad specifications.

For all you shoppers out there who use the ZRecs Guide to help make online purchasing decisions, we encourage you to check out and consider BayingHound's offer. We appreciate their advertising business and see a boost in our direct-sold advertising as a key way to diversify and improve the income we see from ZRecs, which in turn can help make what we do possible over the longer term. It's also the best deal out there for swapping an old SIGG for a new water bottle if you're interested in trying another brand.

Thanks to a shipment in today of three styles of stainless steel straw water bottles by Nathan, it looks like we're up to twenty-one competitors in our upcoming BPA-Free Water Bottle Showdown. We're also still working on some SIGG news and analysis that is currently on simmer while we wait for some confirmations, elaborations, and inside information.

In the meantime, we'd like to let you know about a great giveaway that just fell into our lap.

We've been big fans of Thinksport insulated stainless steel water bottles [ZRecs Guide|website] since we first evaluated them last year on our now-laid-to-rest blog Gardenaut. We have also been on the lookout for a great giveaway to match up with our errant monthly newsletter, with which we've had an on-again, off-again relationship that would make Carrie Bradshaw blush. So when the head of Think Operations, the company behind both the Thinksport bottles and Thinkbaby bottles and sippy cups, offered to let us give away some, we were quick to respond.

Here's the deal: We'll give five Thinksport stainless steel water bottles to one winner when our September newsletter comes out on September 1. These bottles retail at around $18 for a 350 ml water bottle and $22 for a 750 ml bottle, and the winner can pick what combination of water bottles from Thinksport they'd like - all big, or two bigs and three littles for the kiddos, and so on - to share with their family, bestow upon their friends, or hoard for a near lifetime of water bottley goodness.

We haven't yet worked out exactly how this giveaway will work, except that it will in some way involve you actually opening your newsletter, and emailing us within a certain timeframe at a provided giveaway email address to let us know you'd really like them, after which we'll draw a winner at random. This arrangement is good because it gives you a distinct advantage over all those people who signed up for our newsletter two years ago, and have no idea who we are now, or have abandoned their hotmail account to the parched, pleading buzzards of internet spam, and it keeps us from woefully calling their names into the night, with no response, while you sit there wishing you'd won.

So! If you aren't signed up for our newsletter, we promise you'll like it; it's a monthly (or less!) roundup of our most compelling research, product reviews, and navel-gazing. You can sign up to receive it, and have a chance to win more water bottles than you could possibly need, here.

Today's SIGG story is bringing a lot of new faces to Z Recommends and the ZRecs Network. If that's you, here's a list of our core principles as demonstrated by some of the best original consumer reporting we've done in the last few months. Our blogs are all about kids and their parents, so if you have or know either of these, we think you'll like us!

Here's what you can count on when you spend time with us:

There is no party line: We're forging our own perspective on what it means to be "BPA-free." We think the CPSIA is a travesty. We have defended Nalgene (that one's in our archives). We are environmentalists, safety advocates, pragmatists, and creative consumers, and we strive for well-informed and original analysis that makes no assumptions and plays no favorites.

We are not reactionary: Analysis of Health Canada's report on BPA in non-polycarbonate baby bottles: Relax, it's ok.

Information is useful: Know which Carter's tagless clothing could give your infant chemical burns - by looking at the tags. Vague recall? We'll get the full story, and the story behind the story. We listen in on industry on a regular basis and tell you the stories they don't want you to hear, like the real reasons behind some claimed product safety improvements.

We do our homework: We published an original report on BPA and phthalates in blenders and food processors, and maintain the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products, a product directory identifying chemicals of concern for over 1,100 children's products from nearly 200 brands.

Product reviews can educate and entertain: Whether it's the latest in chemically-safe kids' dishes, a Sippy Cup Showdown, car seats, or everything else, you'll walk away from a product review with an informed perspective.

Objectivity soothes us: We don't keep anything we review, unless we pay for it.

Our network bloggers on The Tranquil Parent explore giving their kids unlimited candy, make weird vegan foods that taste awesome, and train readers in the gentle art of parenting-style-defense.

We also publish a directory of blog giveaways for parents, so if you have a few minutes, you could always go win something.

You can follow what we do - our consumer research, our ideas, and our projects - by signing up to get Z Recommends via RSS or email and/or following us on Twitter at @zrecsmom, @jmcnichols, and @ZRecs_Safety.

The high level of consumer expertise and inquisitiveness is one of our favorite things about regular ZRecs readers, and we've been reading into the Amazon purchases you make through our sites for a while now as a partial guide to what baby gear, sippy cups, kids' toys and books, and BPA-free water bottles you're thinking about, investing in, and willing to take a chance on. We realized recently that if we are able to learn so much from how our readers vote with their dollars, you could too - and we could learn more by asking you what you thought of these items now that you've tried them out.

That's the idea behind You Bought It, a new feature on ZRecs where we'll browse through the statistics of Amazon purchases made through ZRecs sites and invite readers who picked up some interesting items to discuss them. We'll highlight most-purchased items, products with strengths or weaknesses that seem to make or break products for some parents, and unusual items we only discovered thanks to your purchases.

In case it even needs to be said, all of the data we have on shopping through our links is completely anonymous. We have no idea who might have purchased what, or even what was purchased in combination with other items. Amazon works very hard to protect your privacy - what they maintain for us is a spreadsheet of what was purchased through our links. The sales of products through our sites helps fund our consumer research, advocacy, and independent product reviewing here on Z Recommends (as well as funding the care and feeding of our other blogs and the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products) - without it, we honestly wouldn't be able to do what we do. So this is as good a time as any to say - although we try to say it often - "Thanks!"

For this first round, we'll cover the period from June 1 until yesterday - a period which, for the sake of context, covers 1,095 items shipped. Further installments of You Bought It will cover about a month at a time.

Sippy Cups, Straw Cups, and Adult Water Bottles

More than anything else in the past few months, readers picked up sippy cups, straw cups, and water bottles. Here are some hard numbers.

Spending of ZRecs readers and passers-by on sippy and straw cups tends to cluster around some brands that are probably a bit less widely available, giving them a boost over the biggest national brands. (At least, that's what we tell ourselves about the fact that so few of you snapped up the Contigo AutoSeal, or the Playtex Insulator Straw Cup, through our Amazon links.) But the way that spending is distributed is pretty interesting anyway, in light of the recommendations we've made in this summer's Sippy Cup Showdowns.

Here's the breakdown of the top seven sippy and straw cups we saw the most activity for in that period:

• Tilty: 28 two-packs, or 56 cups, at $2.50-$5 per cup


• Innate MeMe: 22 sippys at $17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Sippy Cup: 10 sippys at $16-$17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Straw Cup: 7 straw cups at $12-$18 per cup


• Thinkbaby: 14 sippys at $9 per cup


• Munchkin Mighty Grip Flip-Top Straw Cup: 12 (in singles or two-packs), at $4-$8 per cup


• KidBasix Safe Sippy: 8 sippys, at $13-$15 per cup


• Nalgene Grip-n-Gulp: 8 sippys, at $7-$11 per cup

All of these but the Foogo and Safe Sippy were Top Picks in our Infant to Toddler or Toddler to Pre-K Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, and each of those middle-tier picks were voted up for inclusion in the Top Picks in our end-of-round reader polls.

What we most want to know is: How do all you Tilty shoppers like your super-cool, super cheap new sippy cups? Any complaints or surprises? Or are you as thrilled about them as we are?

By the way, at least a few of you also liked the look of the Rubbermaid Litterless Juice Box, which we named the World's Worst Straw Cup - 5 of those sold, too, a reflection of the disagreement among readers over our assessment of it. This is what they mean when they say "any publicity is good publicity," and why companies are still willing to send us products to review even though we don't promise to say only nice things.

For adult water bottles, the score was Camelbak 28 (for the BPA-Free Better Bottles - gotta love that bite valve - and Performance Bottles, with prices ranging from $8-$14 apiece), Thinksport 25 (a double-walled, fantastically-insulating, tank of a stainless steel sport bottle, selling for $16-$18 apiece) and Nalgene 8 (for their Tritan OTG bottles and wide-mouth bottles, $10-$12 apiece). A few of you bought Nathan stainless steel straw bottles, which we've never written about.

A couple of you bought these "Insta-Sip" screw-on sippy adapters for bottled water bottles. We were scratching our heads when we arrived at the product's page on Amazon and saw that fully half of Amazon shoppers who viewed these purchased them at $15 for two little sippy lids instead of the item suggested below the product image, a $3 alternative by Gerber. Then we realized the reason was probably because the Insta-Sip is labeled on Amazon in the product details as containing no polycarbonate plastic (and thus, presumably, being BPA-free) while the Gerber product description was silent on the issue.

This is typical of Gerber's unilaterally asleep-at-the-wheel behavior when it comes to providing definitive, trustworthy information regarding the BPA status of their products. (In case you were wondering why the vast majority of the many Gerber sippy and straw cups on the market were absent from our Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, well, every time we call customer service they tell us something different, and no one else there will talk to us.) Memo to Gerber: The fact that a product priced at five times what you charge for a similar item is matching you on sales is proof that you are HEMORRHAGING MONEY by acting like no one has ever heard about BPA. Genie, bottle, out. Join us.

Other Stuff You Bought The Most

It shouldn't surprise any long-term readers of Z Recommends or users of the ZRecs Guide that our readers buy a lot of children's feeding items. Munchie Mugs, Boon Snack Balls, and BabyBjorn plate and spoon sets are all items we love that were frequently purchased. The Munchie Mug is the best toddler-accessible snack carrier we've ever used, the Snack Ball is the most fun and whimsical, and the BabyBjorn plate has a great design for making it easier for kids to self feed, thanks to its genuinely non-skid base and unique shape. We saw a handful of each of these items purchased in the last couple months.

If any of you BabyBjorn plate users haven't noticed yet, the white part of the bowl pops out of the base for cleaning. It took us a while to figure that out!

We also saw purchases of several Booginhead SippiGrips, which we had never seen before. The SippiGrip is a sippy cup tether (seen plenty of those) but for some reason these things sell. My question - for any of you who purchased these, or have used them - it promises that it has a "unique grip material," but does it work as advertised? Any chance it makes your child throw their cup more - and can they haul it back up themselves once they've done so? Inquiring minds want to know.

Several of you also picked up Munchkin snack catchers, which we've never reviewed but always planned to, because we really dislike them. (We did give it two stars in the ZRecs Guide, but a video of its failings would be much more illuminating.) So if you have one of these, tell us - do you like it? If you do, have you had it for long, washed it many times? We've found that the petals that are supposed to hold snacks in quickly lose a bit of their shape, and that it then leaks crumbs and even small snack items like nobody's business. How about you?

Several of you haven't forgotten about the Green Toys Tea Set, either, which is one of our favorite recycled plastic toys. If you have a cute photo of your child playing with yours, send it to us and we'll publish it (and link to your blog, if you have one). We'd love to hear what you and your child think of it, but we're pretty sure you love it too, right down to the packaging.

The Most Expensive Stuff You Bought

Three of you bought Avent Steam Sterilizers, which was an interesting outlier - no one bought any other bottle sterilizer by any other brand through ZRecs during that time. What's up with that? Is it because it's well-discounted, or was there some other motivating factor?

Ninety-four of you (!) bought 30-minute Flip digital video camcorders when they were on sale for $50-$60. Either that, or some of you bought more than one. Given the absurdly low sale price you paid for it, how do you like it?

Several of you bought Hamilton Beach food processors after we identified their BPA status; this food processor was the most popular, and is frequently on sale for around 25% off. We had never (and still have never) used Hamilton Beach products, so we'd really like to know: If you bought this, how has it performed?

ZRecs visitors also dropped some Benjamins on a Beaba Babycook, which we are currently testing for review; a few BabyBjorn Travel Cribs, which we loved but balked at the price of; and several Britax car seats - a Roundabout and two Boulevards. (Compare this with 18 Britax seat sales we tracked during their last semi-annual sale, and a bunch of Frontiers that sold after our in-depth comparison between it and its competition.) Any thoughts on these, users of very nice expensive products?

Interesting Baby Gear, Toys, Books, and Music You Bought

We'll skip the random items you added to your shopping carts to get free shipping or the really nice things that are totally non-kid-related that you clearly purchased through ZRecs to help give us a boost (thanks for that, by the way) and focus on a few on-topic purchases that caught our eye.

A couple of you picked up KidCo Adhesive Mount Magnet Locks, just the kind of product that usually makes our eyes glaze over. But these are a really great idea, a step above the kinds of cabinet locks we used with Z. A few reviews on Amazon seemed frustratingly surprised by the lack of keys in the set (yes, you have to buy the keys and locks separately) but I suspect the reason for this is that you just keep a couple of the keys around and use them for all the locks, which means you'd want to buy the locks separately. So if you bought or have used these, we really want to know: Do these work as well as you'd hoped?

Plan Toys has a really cute toddler pounding toy (they call it the Punch and Drop), with balls you knock into a box, and a couple of you purchased it, although we had never mentioned it.

We love almost every Plan Toy product we've handled (with one disappointing exception). The natural dyes they use, the way they sand stuff down, and the way they incorporate any other materials needed to enhance a product - in the case of this wooden toy, it looks like they have plastic or rubber seals that give the balls a resting place and provide some friction for pounding - is really top-notch. This design in particular makes a lot more sense than the wood-on-wood pounding of standard tool-bench style pounders - it's just so hard to get the wooden pegs and holes to match up at just the point of friction, and then they swell or shrink in different climates. We like the look of this toy almost as much as we like Plan Toys' Hammer Balls set, which is truly the standard-setter for this type of toy as far a we're concerned.

Someone also bought Plan Toys' Shape and Sort It Out set, which looks like a really nice version of a cheap Melissa & Doug version of the toy we had when Z was an infant and toddler.

A few of you are still buying Fred Party People Chopsticks, which we found to be one of the better inexpensive options for chopsticks for children in our Toddler Chopstick Showdown - a six-pack costs about $10. And a few of you have been picking up rattles from Sassy's cute, relatively new Earth Brights line, like this one. We like the way they're combining brightly-colored fabrics and wood in some of these infant toy designs.

You picked up some interesting books for your own perusal, including Home Comforts (our own family's favorite go-to guide for "the art and science of keeping house"), the intriguing The Complete Organic Pregnancy, The Top 100 Baby Purees, a nice alternative to the standard baby food cookbook, and A Child's Garden, a book offering "60 ideas to make any garden come alive for children." Somebody got a great-looking Eric Carle growth chart.

As for kids' books, we love poring over our sales summaries because our readers help us find great kids' books all the time. First, though, a couple we recommended seemed to go over well: Several of you bought Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's seminal The Important Book or Wendy Pfeffer and Robin Brickman's astonishing, beautiful A Log's Life - the former after we mentioned it as one of our Ten Favorite Kids' Books (you should check out the rest!), and the latter likely because we wrote that "there really isn't a more beautiful introduction to life cycles, food webs, and ecological niches than this lovely book." If you did buy either of these, tell us: Do you and your children love it as much as we do?

Several of you jumped at the chance to buy books in Jessica Spanyol's Minibugs series after we reviewed one earlier this week, or one of you bought every single one. Are they what you expected, based on our review?

Speaking of seminal, if there is any child who does not need ready access to The Monster At the End of This Book, which several of you bought in the past couple months, it is really the single most important Sesame Street book you could buy for $5. Michael Smollin's illustrations are fabulous and the story is a crack-up for anyone who has ever been afraid of anything, or wished that a character inside a book would try to destroy it.

Books you bought that we hadn't known about include the Skippyjon Jones books, which we are pretty sure Z is going to flip out over, and Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales on CD. Lobel is a great reader of his own stories (we own his Frog and Toad stories on CD) and it was cool to discover this one too, which we'll probably spring for if it isn't at our local library. You also bought What's Alive?, one of so many well-conceived and surprising books in the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science series that we must, must, must get our own hands on. Seriously, we should own stock in this publisher.

ZRecs readers are big, big fans of Putumayo Kids CDs. The music series is good enough that if you have heard any, you are probably a fan too.

If You Bought It: What Did You Think Of It?

One of the best things about the community of readers that has developed around Z Recommends is their interest in sharing the pros and cons of kids' stuff they've tried. So if you own any of the products above, tell us what you think of them! We'll collect some of the most interesting feedback we get and highlight it in a later post, or even quote you in the ZRecs Guide listing for the product, where we're working on adding opinions on the products we cover from several additional sources. So browse the post above and take a moment to give us your two cents on products your fellow readers are probably thinking about buying right now! (If you're reading this post in your email or an RSS reader, click here to visit the post and comment.)

Like what you read on Z Recommends? You can have posts delivered for free every day via RSS or email, as well as occasional summaries of our links to other blogs, news articles, and websites from our Delicious feed (our alternative to published link roundups). If you're already a subscriber, please click through to this post if you like it, to let us know you'd like to see more content like this.

Observant Z Recommends readers may have noticed that Polliwogged, our blog dedicated to all things baby, and Gardenaut, our gardening and outdoors blog, disappeared from our top-level navigation and ZRecs home page feed, and, more pointedly, that they stopped posting new content a couple of weeks ago. We have decided to refocus our blogging energies as well as our financial resources, and have learned that managing six blogs was stretching both of these thinner than we'd like.

Big thanks to Emily, who also blogs at Boutique Cafe; Sara, the fabulous baby product reviewer who also runs the fabulous online cloth diaper shop Diaper Daisy; Jenn, our deals and bargains blogger who dishes at her parenting blog TBFKAOP (The Baby Formerly Known As Optimus Prime); our craft blogger Trisha, who blogs at Sweet 'n' Sassy Girls and also sells nursing covers; and Leigh, who contributed frugal and DIY tips when she wasn't busy saving the nation's forests. All of these talented women contributed their time and energy to be a part of the blog and we are honored that they chose to do so.

Reviews of baby gear will will move back to the mother ship, Z Recommends. We promise to review some baby stuff, and will be mining our own database of bloggers on PRIZEY to seek reviewers for some very cool stuff. (Have you joined PRIZEY and opted in to our PR matchmaking program? We help PR representatives find truly relevant bloggers to review products, all in the name of reducing spammy PR pitches.)

For the latest sales and discounts on baby stuff, we recommend Baby Cheapskate.

We have also really enjoyed working with all of the bloggers at Gardenaut, and guess what? Most of them have agreed to continue posting about gardening and the outdoors on an irregular basis on The Tranquil Parent! Given that TTP is a green, health, safety, and happiness blog, we thought a few gardening posts sprinkled in here and there would be pretty awesome. So thanks to all of the bloggers who have offered to continue contributing there, and thanks too to those who have decided to step down but provided some great posts over the past ten months.

About the good news

We're closing down these two blogs because we need to refocus our energies on the parts of ZRecs that are closest to our core mission. That means there is a lot of good news to come, and soon. We'll be tackling some projects we've been dreaming about for a while, and expanding our efforts in areas that we hope you agree makes fundamental sense with what ZRecs is all about - sharing information and advice to help you and your family be healthy, harmonious, creative, and engaged with the world in those special years we get to share with our growing children.

We'll announce each project or topic as we're ready to launch it, but we can tell you this right now: We will not be starting more new blogs. We're consolidating, refocusing, honing in, and leveraging. We've learned a lot in the past year or so about time management, prioritization, and the importance of focusing your personal energy as well as your resources on your core mission, and we hope the results speak for themselves.

Jenni, Z and I were in Chicago last weekend attending BlogHer '09, a two-day gathering of women bloggers (and a few men) organized by the influential women's blogging community of the same name. Without getting into too much of the drama and debate that swirled around this conference's highly visible sponsorship opportunities, the sponsored attendees who handed out product samples to cover their conference expenses, and the overzealous company offering of, and blogger lust for "swag" - you know, bags full of junk that some people are willing to wait in long lines (or even blackmail!) to get, and other people can't fathom trying to bring home - I will say that this will probably go down as a tipping point in the mommyblogging community, and one it was helpful to see unfold firsthand.

Swag is just a symptom

We had not been to BlogHer before, and although we were a little put out by some aspects of the dual marketing efforts - of BlogHer's sponsors to its members and vice versa - we did not experience the same pangs as long-term members of BlogHer's community. We saw a community that had suddenly accepted that it was more sick than it had realized, and that sickness was expressing itself in symptoms that worried and disheartened everyone who knew what a healthy conversational community looked like. I won't use the term "cancer" because the cells' allegiances here are not either/or, on or off, good or bad, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with swag - you'll see some at any conference, as some have observed. But swag collecting became a tangible metaphor for what else was going on at the conference and what some of these bloggers did from their Blogger or Wordpress back-end: Collecting free products in exchange for their (and others') apparently not-very-valuable attention. It also became a metaphor for how anyone's vision can be clouded by good marketing, and how difficult it can be to remember what it is you really want and need, when confronted with what you can have for free.

We have all watched all of this unfolding over the last couple of years, to be sure. We have watched brand-sponsored moms secure their 15 minutes of fame thanks to self-serving ethical stances on blogging and product recommendations, and we have seen bloggers who parrot PR pitches and miraculously think every sample they get is "great" get declared among the "most influential" folks in social media, as well as moves towards new government (FTC) oversight of bloggers.

We have generally chosen not to comment on these individuals (and won't name any here), both because we generally assume our readers do not want to hear our thoughts about blogging simply because we are bloggers - blogging is our medium, not our message - and because we don't know how to pick fights with people we think have bad intentions without making ourselves look bad too. But last weekend, while many in the BlogHer community were realizing that the actions of some "mommybloggers" had so badly tainted the public perception of moms who blog that they felt obligated to disavow the term, we were realizing that the world had changed around "blog reviews," too.

We fought the zeitgest, and the zeitgeist won

We started blogging back before there were many parent-oriented review blogs, and we typically got one of two reactions when we told people we published product reviews. One was, "Wow, I have been trying to find a good car seat/kids' game/breast pump. What should I buy?" The other was, "Oh, I don't have any kids." Within six months we had found a broader vision, and we began calling ourselves consumer researchers and consumer advocates as well as product reviewers as we learned the ropes of leveraging the power of free media to change the way companies do business. But while we are most proud of our research and advocacy on issues like Bisphenol-A and the way we were able to uncover and disseminate information and establish ourselves as the publication of record on some breaking consumer issues affecting parents, we have been equally proud of the integrity and honesty with which we review new children's products, and consider it an equally valuable service, even more so in a blogging culture that is sick with, for lack of a better term, swag.

Through it all, we prided ourselves on the fact that we kept less than 10% of the products we review, that we make no promise of review for products received, that we frequently point out negative features of products or publish entirely negative reviews, that we declare products we do keep as income on our taxes, that we donate the other 90% of our review items to charity or give them away, and that we make an effort to let readers know that the products we review are predominantly provided by the companies who make or promote them. We thought this was enough.

But what we realized at BlogHer was that there was no way to easily distinguish this service - performed not only by Z Recommends but by a host of other other hard-working, honest, and fully-disclosing blogs that publish reviews - when we encounter people who have not yet read our blog. When I introduced myself to people this weekend who were not already familiar with ZRecs, the phrase "product reviews" triggered in most cases an instant shifting of the stance, a hardening of the features, and a sudden resistance to my claims of relevance. I found myself trying out amended descriptions of our blog - "'real' product reviews," "'critical' product reviews," "'unbiased' product reviews" but nothing felt right.

I ended up instinctively gravitating towards statements like "consumer advocates and researchers, who also publish product reviews," which felt wrong, too. Why should we be ashamed of reviewing products? And if we should be ashamed, should we stop? Had we already lost the battle of trust for any reader who had discovered us after information about BPA was everywhere, people who took for granted that there are dozens of BPA-free bottles on the market now, instead of two or three? I was suddenly faced with the possibility that the only readers we have who do trust our product reviewing may be those who encountered us through one of our acts of consumer advocacy. And I wonder still.

But through that rude awakening, we also found another path. And once we had verbalized it, many things fell into place. Jenni and I discussed it over a drink in the hotel bar on the second day of the conference: We needed to stop keeping stuff, period. It didn't matter that our reviewing was not driven by samples, that we have never been and will never be paid to write a review, that we only kept items very rarely, that we paid taxes on them when we did, and that we had made a habit of declaring the sources of our review products in our reviews. The fact that others were motivated by product samples, kept a lot of them, literally got paid in cash or gift cards, abused their role as reviewers and betrayed the trust of those they hoped to speak to, meant that that wasn't good enough anymore. Ten years in newspaper and magazine journalism had taught me that trust was maintained not just by avoiding bias but by avoiding the perception of bias, but for some reason we hadn't connected all the dots here. We needed to stop keeping any review products.

Exhausted but invigorated by our experiences at BlogHer, last night Jenni and I fleshed out the concept as best we could, and late in the evening I turned to one of my closest online friends and most trusted sources of feedback, Adrienne Jones of Baby Toolkit, for some additional guidance. Her primary role in this case was to help force us to answer a couple of logistical questions, but the thing I'll remember most is her quick shorthanding of our proposed policy as "KNS" - "Keep No Stuff."

What our Keep No Stuff policy means

Beginning today, we will abide by what we call a Keep No Stuff policy. It is not necessarily as simple as that, because life is not as simple as that. But it is as simple as we can make it, in alignment with all of our values. Here's how it works:

• No product we review (or decline to review) will be kept as free "swag." The assumed destination of any product sample we accept or otherwise receive will be that it will be given away to someone outside of our immediate family or donated to a relevant charity.


• If and when we decide to keep a product - either because Z loves it, or we realize we really need it and have integrated it into our home life - we will declare in the review that we are keeping it, declare it as income on our taxes, and donate the difference between that tax burden and the going retail price of the item to charity. For example, that means if we review a $100 item and decide to keep it, that $100 will be declared as income. If that results in our paying $25 of tax on that income, we will donate an additional $75 to charity to make up the difference. Since we are already logging the few review items we keep and paying taxes on them, doing this accounting at tax time will not be hard. We considered an alternative way of protecting our real income - donating the review item anyway and then buying it new like any other consumer - but the environmental implications of double-shipping bothered us.


• Just so everything is crystal clear, we will also declare in every review when we are not keeping something, and our general policies regarding that.


• Consumable products will not be covered by this policy. Please assume we are consuming these, and that we are not accepting more than we need or than is natural to offer for a useful product sampling, as is traditional of consumable samples in most media outlets. But we will also not hesitate to mention at any opportunity that in some ways our policy is more stringent than the unspoken agreements in mainstream media, because even books and music will be covered by our policy, and are not with most newspapers, magazines, or other print publications. We'll save that discussion for another day.


• This policy is not intended to judge anyone else's blog policies, because we don't think it is impossible to review products fairly and then keep them (and could name a handful of blogs to prove it); we just think is that it is now nearly impossible to convince anyone that you do. We also don't expect most bloggers who might want to lean towards this type of system to adhere to it as stringently as we intend to ourselves; we do not pretend to know the challenges any individual blogger faces in feeding their families, and it is frankly none of our business, although it may soon be the FTC's.


• At least for now, we will not hold our guest contributors to this policy, although we will make relevant disclosures about the product's origins. ZRecs contributors are paid either very little or not at all, never enough for the value of the contributions they make to our blog, and we will continue to make use of outside reviewers we can trust for unbiased reviews, and expect that to be enough for our readers, too.


• Although we will update our Policies and Procedures on ZRecs.com, any of the details of this policy could evolve and change as we figure out how to make a KNS policy work without damaging our ability to efficiently and effectively review products for our readers, which is our top priority in review blogging. But if anything does change, we will promptly alert readers to these changes and explain why we have made them.

Special thanks to

We watched with surprise and admiration last week as Liz Gumbinner, Susan Getgood, Kristen Chase, and Julie Marsh unveiled Blog with Integrity, an opportunity for bloggers to display their allegiance to a shared statement of principles and practices for transparent and less-compromised blogging. It is an important moment and these four women know very well the challenge of what they're trying to do; they have crafted a pledge that is as forceful as they can make it yet open-ended enough to encourage the broad-based adoption needed for this to have a real impact on the community and how others perceive it.

Our own policy above goes further in some ways (although not much further than the stated policies of Liz and Kristen's shared site, Cool Mom Picks, which also does not keep review products) but does not address some other elements of the Blog With Integrity pledge. We may or may not join that pledge, as we aren't quite sure what it will mean to readers if it is adopted by masses of review blogs that then fail to adhere to its policies, or interpret them very differently; but good leadership can go a long way. We do encourage any readers who are bloggers to check it out and consider signing on to it, particularly if you review products on your blog.