Tech Blogosphere: More Water Cooler, Less Telephone Game, Please

Remember playing the "telephone game" as a child? You'd stand in a line or sit in a circle and pass messages from one person to the next, whispering into an ear. At the end of the line, the message was usually so garbled from the first person as to be unrecognizable from what it began as. So goes the tech blogosphere these days.

News moves at a fast and furious pace, with each blogger trying to jump on the latest news as quickly as possible. Bloggers are said to "write first, fact-check later (if at all)," and more and more, the lead stories gaining traction are sensational, and nearly as garbled as that last telephone message.

Take Yahoo's news, for example. If you read the tech blogs, Yahoo is going under faster than the Titanic after it met the iceberg. Yes, there are a bunch of execs leaving. Some of them left after vesting (Flickr founders) which is normal behavior after an acquisition. Some are leaving because of the decreased focus on search going forward (Qi Lu), which makes perfect sense. And yes, the stock is hovering around $22.00 a share, but their 52-week low was closer to $18.00 a share, and much of the inflation of the stock was due to speculation about a Microsoft buy-out, so it's to be expected that the stock would go back to pre-Microsoft-talks levels. We are still talking about a company that makes an actual profit, something most of the Web 2.0 darlings haven't even thought about doing. So do the headlines include talk of a "death spiral?" Is this news we're reading or fodder for a tech tabloid?

Second case? The flap over the AP. I still stand by my assertion that the DMCA notices that they filed weren't wrong, and if you read Robert Cox's take on the full history, you might agree. The AP hasn't set ANY price schedule for bloggers using AP content, yet we've seen price lists all over the blogosphere purported to be for use on blogs. I was angry and questioning my original stance until I actually looked for any evidence of the AP saying I personally would be paying them $12.50 for using more than 25 words as a quote and found absolutely nothing.

If bloggers want to be taken seriously as journalists, they need to actually check sources before flying off the handle. I don't blame the AP for not talking to bloggers. They are working through a PR nightmare based on a few bloggers flying off the handle and splashing a story everywhere that doesn't exist. Yahoo is doing much the same thing. And Techmeme today looks more like the supermarket check-out aisle than tech "news."