Life is grand

Professional journalists have another weapon in their armory of arguments against blogs with Engadget’s rash blogging of an email from Apple stating that Leopard (next version of Mac OS X) and the iPhone would be delayed. It turned out to be fake but damage was done to Apple’s stock ($4billion wiped out at the depths, recovering to a $1billion loss by the end of trading.)

I don’t particularly like the culture of “Post it now, ask forgiveness later” of some blog sites. I’d want Engadget to take stock of its mistake and work on preventing it in the future but I wouldn’t want this to be the start of a legal clamping down on what are private websites on the internet.

What should happen is Engadget suffers their mistake through reduced readership as their readers loose some faith in them and go elsewhere. I don’t see that happening yet but a few more mistakes like this could cripple a blog like Engadget.

Funny how the same rules that apply to professionals is coming around to apply to us “amateurs” as our popularity increases. Accountability, responsibility, thoughtfulness, these are as important to blogs as they are to mainstream media. It is partly why I don’t subscribe to Engadget, I cannot count on it for the really important things. I listen to respected work colleagues, a few professional journalists and individual bloggers for that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.