further continuation:

Not to mention "about 219,000" results on google for "Palin continent Africa"

I remember a "goodbye cruel world" post by early adopter of blogging, Chris Allbritton (BacktoIraq.com,) who said he was too disgusted to participate any more in a medium where Iraq war rumors got around the world on the internet before the truth could get its boots on. It was after some pretty pernicious rumors about some atrocities that were all hearsay and keyboard anti-U.S. warriors in their jammies hyper-analyzing fake videos or something like that. He knew the allegations to be fake from "on the ground" reporting, but he was getting blasted by lots of the keyboardists as a imperialist lackey for saying so. l He came back, but he took a couple of months before he did. And a favorite theme of his after that was: blogging is not reporting without boots on the ground, and most blogging is just like the game of telephone, where the more times a story is removed from the source, the worse for the truth.

When people brag about something going "viral," I automatically presume it is spin respun a 1,000 times until it's proven otherwise. It's no coincidence that marketers of products think viral meme spread is the best thing since sliced bread.

Related rant. I am real picky, I guess. It even irritates me when people cite secondary reporting instead of the original, i.e., an A.P. story that starts out "The New York Times" is reporting..." You know the original story is at The New York Times, don't just read and quote the A.P. on it, trusting them to get it right, go and read the frigging original. This is also part of the reason why when I read a great article, I might recommend it in a blog entry, but I am loathe to add my own spin to it to the recommend. I know that this bugs some people, but if it's good, why should I add a layer of spin? I just don't get why people want introductory spin on something already published, it truly ends up to spinning one's wheels, you're adding layers that have to be unpeeled.