Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

In the ongoing debate over blog credibility, it seems like the past week or so has been heavy on the rumors, and pretty light on details. False rumors published on Engadget of a delay to Apple’s iPhone took a chunk out of Apple’s market cap last week, and although there were very few announcements, there were rumors that MySpace was acquiring Photobucket; rumors of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo (later denied by the company); rumors of Yahoo Acquiring Bebo; yet more rumors of Google acquiring Feedburner; just to mention a few of the myriad of rumors spreading around the blogosphere. Popular tech celebrity Guy Kawasaki even launched a (much panned) site totally focused on allowing people to post their own rumors.

Although some of these deals may actually happen, in reading about all of these rumors, I keep thinking back to the false Emulex earnings release back in 2000, which cause Emulex to lose $2.2B in market cap, and resulted in InternetWire renaming itself to Marketwire. In that case, a pseudo-trusted source (a press wire) was duped into sending out a bogus release; however, nowadays almost anyone with a blog and an audience can start their own rumor of an acquisition or merger. I wonder if the many rumors/repeated rumors and third hand news reports are doing more harm to the general credibility of bloggers than good?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Mergers and Acquisitions. 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.