Ed Bott points out that bloggers (Boing Boing and others in this case) are every bit as capable of running wild with a rumor as the MSM is. This is in reference to the unconfirmed rumor that MS was looking at buying Claria (the spyware outfit):

So the rumor became a confirmed story and now it's a done deal. Not to mention that the change in the status of Claria's products happened as much as four months ago. Back in the reality-based community, the whole story's still just a rumor based on a pair of stories from unnamed sources, but science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who authored the Boing Boing piece, apparently has a news feed from a parallel universe.

And to compound the error, Prof. Brad DeLong picks it up and calls Microsoft a "company behaving very badly," because if you read it on the Internets, it must be true.

Time to put that bottle of triumphalism back in the cooler, and grab the cod liver oil instead. As Scoble points out, this kind of thing does real damage to MS, and warrants a retraction.