Blogs and their influence on stockmarkets
OK, regular blogs won’t have any influence on mostly nothing. But here is a story about Egagdget – the top blog worldwide according to technorati – which posted a story, apparently without solid research on the information, something most bloggers forget about… Only this time, it cost 4 billion dollars:
Last week, technology blog Engadget wrongly reported that the FCC had failed to grant Apple a license for its iPhone. When they published a report based on a hoax Apple employee email that was sent to the offices of Engagdet it caused a drop in Apple stock by $4 billion. When they found out their mistake, Engadget quickly apologized and stock rose again when Apple finally announced that the FCC had approved the phone. The lack of fact checking by blogs has stirred the journalist vs blogger debate yet again.
Question is: will Bloggers have to face this responsibility? Do they have the same obligations as main stream media, only because they have a similar sized readership? Before, I would have doubted this, but reading that story, I don’t know. But where do you draw the line? At a 1.000 readers per day? Or more than 1.000 links on technorati? What is the threshold for moral obligations?