★ Blogs with Question Marks. Stop it!

You’re a blogger and you write about technology, news, gossip and trends. You make millions of Internet dollars a year authoring this blog. That’s awesome and I’m happy for you. I’m not jealous of your fame but I embrace our need to write about mundane things and regurgitate news from all over the Internet.

It’s 10AM and you’re a tech blogger filtering through press releases and copying & pasting those to your blog and acting like you’re a journalist when someone with an @live.com email account messages you and says the following:

Hi. My name is John and I work for [insert tech company here]. We have this new product coming out soon. It’s a followup to our award winning [insert cool product here] that came out last year. This year we’re adding a touch screen and doubling the storage plus a breakthrough feature called “OMFG-ism” but I can’t tell you what it does yet. Please keep this anonymous and I’m just giving you a heads up.

As an attention starved blogger living in your huge mansion, you post tidbits but because you’re in the Technorati Top 100, you shouldn’t really post that because you do have a sort of influence in this industry that can get people fired, inflate or deflate the stock price and cause mass hysteria. How do you post this juicy info, make enough money to buy a Jaguar S-Type and still maintain your credibility?

You add a question mark. “Apple to release touchscreen 52″ laptops in Q4 of 2010?” All of the sudden you’re free and clear. The entry goes up, you make some money, Apple’s stock goes up, people take your post as truth and you’ve covered your ass when Apple sends you that Cease & Decist letter. Good work blogger. You’re really proving that traditional print and broadcast media is old news. You’re cool, hip and awesome because you can post whatever you want. CNN.com doesn’t have any posts with question marks so why should you be able to?

Ok. Rant over. Thanks for reading.