Think first, publish later

Ian Betteridge argues that blogs aren’t as self-correcting as yer Scobles like to claim:

Watching the development and correction of stories, there’s something interesting that I’ve always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that’s 100,000 people who believe the original story – and unless Scoble’s readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that’s a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

I’ve got a column about this very same thing in issue 181 of .net (which isn’t out for a while yet). It’s the old problem of truth versus Internet Facts.

Tangent: Ian’s blog fell out of my subscriptions list for no good reason a while back. I’d forgotten what a great blog he has.