Is There a Chance Tech Bloggers Could Stop Spreading Rumors? Definitely Not.

Do you ever think it is strange how eagerly we, bloggers, distribute rumors that have nothing to do with reality when we want to believe this or that particular prediction to be true? Whenever we get some new rumor initiated - be it a blogger seeking to get some extra popularity and hoping that the rumor could really eventually come true or a source that is not really familiar with the situation but tries to pretend - we start discussing the rumor and it spreads around the blogosphere echo chamber like wildfire eventually reaching reputable mainstream publications that don’t want to be left outside of the hottest topic of the day.

We have seen a couple of amazing examples recently - both on very hot topics and both can be characterized as rumors that bloggers could not resist covering because we wanted to believe them so much.

First there was upcoming Apple notebooks event and analysts insisted that to stay healthy during a financial downturn Apple needs to introduce some notebooks to the lower-end market segment - somewhere in the sub-$1,000 category. We discussed that idea for a while and eventually Duncan Riley came up with the information from a source of his that the new price sheets in Apple stores contain some position for $799. Everyone wanted Apple to lower the entrance point for users to the world of Apple laptops so much that the immediate reaction was very predictable: the rumor gained traction and lots of bloggers (me included) were more than willing to distribute the news of $800 laptop from Apple and it eventually reached mainstream media publications.

But the actual announcement last week did not include any laptop in the sub-$1,000 category that many analysts insisted Apple needed to stay healthy in the market (if we don’t think that $999 for the old white plastic MacBook is actually under $1K). Many people were more than disappointed after hearing us all discuss the rumors that proved to be far from true and some even accused Duncan he was guilty of this disappointment.

I have no idea what kind of source informed Duncan of the new pricing but if anyone from Apple sent me a tip on something similar, I would have surely posted about it as soon as I could as this is the piece of news no blogger can afford to ignore. It was just too much of a temptation to keep silence about and wait until more facts emerge.

The next piece of news that - after thinking it over for a while - was actually more than doubtful and required serious fact checking that the blogosphere did not bother to engage in was about T-Mobile selling 1.5 million G1 phones powered with Google’s Android operating well before the devices actually started shipping.

The news seemed to be reported everywhere and the blogosphere (me included) eagerly congratulated Google on the power of their buzz machine comparing it with the fact that it took Apple 75 days to sell the first million of iPhones for the first generation device.

The story initiated on Fool.com and was quickly picked by numerous technology blogs and even reached the blog of Information Week. But later on I received a comment on my own post from Information Week’s Marin Perez (not the author of the Information Week’s report) who pointed out that he himself could hardly believe the news and thought that Google and T-Mobile would have immediately confirmed the record preordered number of phones if it actually had been true. He added:

It seems a bit of an absurd figure to be honest, as only existing customers can buy it. Additionally, there hasn’t been that big of an advertising campaign as far as I can tell. There’s nowhere near the casual buzz as there was for iPhones.

Marin even bothered and published an article about why he thought the 1.5 million was a number hard to believe at all. He also contacted the author of the initial story on Motley Fool and found out that the figure was actually a guess based on some facts that could be interpreted in this way or another easily. From Marin’s article it becomes absolutely clear that the 1.5 million phones guess really had nothing to do with reality - but it was so very much welcomed to demonstrate the power of the almighty Google that it quickly spread in the tech echo chamber.

I think if you track the tech blogosphere for a month or so, you will easily find a few new examples of such rumors that are based on zero facts and too many hopes that we all seem to share - thus making it easier for false rumors to reach anyone who reads any technology blog at all.

The interesting thing is that the blogosphere has actually learned to predict major announcements like Apple’s notebooks event well enough - with the exact dates and some details included. And while there are always things that are left behind with bloggers failing to mention them for lack of sources or imagination, we can often see a huge number of details known in advance - both spoiling the surprise for many observers and helping technology bloggers feel important about our power to break news long before anyone knows anything for sure.

Honestly, I think it could be a surefire blogging strategy in itself for bloggers lacking actual sources and still wanting to break news from time to time: just use your imagination to predict something that may or may not happen in the near future and that is very much anticipated with people eagerly waiting for idea to become a reality. And if eventually your prediction comes true, you can always use it as an example of reliability of the information you publish on your blog. If not, you can always say you were misinformed by your sources - still enjoying all the traffic spikes you have received and maybe even a few hundreds of extra RSS subscribers. But of course such a strategy could also be risky as other bloggers can eventually figure out you are making the stories up and you can even face some legal issues if your predictions damage someone’s portfolio price, for example.

But there’s a bigger problem as such a strategy damages the general credibility of blogs so I hope smaller blogs don’t start to break big news guessing or imagining them in order to get noticed as an important source of information. While the tech blogosphere (me included) definitely needs a lesson in fact checking and at least learning how to think critically over such sensational headlines before rushing to publish them on our blogs giving such stories extra traction.

Photo of loud speaker by woodleywonderworks used under Creative Commons.