The Dangers of Blog Rumors

[Crum]

This post is based on a a recent Robert Scoble post about how rumors circulating through the blogosphere can often be misleading.

He refers to one instance in particular where a few days ago rumors about MyBlogLog being acquired by Yahoo were popping up, then were later discovered to be false.

It's a tough subject with bloggers breaking news so often. How can you trust them? Even Scoble himself says that he doesn't always do all of the fact checking.

Scoble does however seem to have a pretty good approach to the matter: Give it 24 hours. If the company hasn't come out and said that the information is false, there's a good chance that it is true.

Obviously this won't apply 100% of the time, but it's not a bad start.

Does anyone else have a different approach that they would like to share?

[janeth]

With all the blogs and bookmarking sites out it makes sense that everyone wants to be the first to break a story. Hitting the right story, just right, can mean 1000's of links and even more visitors.

I'm not sure there will ever be a way to fix this problem and as more and more social media sites appear on the scene and more and more traffic can be gained by these sites I think the problem is only going to get worst.

Before long people will be making up stories just for the buzz.