By Seema Persaud

Last week a blogger for ZDNet, Richard Koman, wrote a piece that was entirely false. Essentially he said that Yahoo gave 200,000 usernames and e-mail addresses to Iranian authorities. They did nothing like that. Koman based the piece on a blog post that had been translated for him. Paul Carr, a blogger for TechCrunch, highlights the errors in detail.

A retraction was posted by the editor-in-chief of ZDNet, Larry Dignan, a day later, admitting that the one source used wasn't credible. But we cannot assume that everyone who read the initial piece saw the follow-up.

The Columbus Dispatch editor Benjamin J. Marrison wrote that consultants for the Dispatch's website said "online news consumers don't mind if your initial report is inaccurate. They just want it first. Online readers know that, over time, the truth will come out." Uh, really?

I have no idea who these consultants are, how in-depth the research was for this finding, or whether this applies to Canadian online news consumers, but I can only see this applicable to celebrity gossip. Admittedly, as a journalist, I'm a tad biased. The truth will come out eventually for stories that warrant a lot of media attention, but what about the smaller posts. What else is being written but not being checked?

In a time of instantaneous retweets and blog posts based on other blog posts (ironically somewhat like this one), how are we to know what is credible? How many of us contact credible sources before we tweet and blog?

On a completely unrelated note, here's something to entertain you. Go to globeandmail.com and hit the following keys:
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, "b", "a". A dialogue box will come up. Click "OK" and hit shift key and spacebar at the same time. A band will come up on the screen, prompting you for a command. Type "contra" and hit enter. Surprise!

Thanks to Mathew Ingram from the The Globe and Mail for tweeting this.