I am so amused when I see two posts on the ping.sg top 10 saying that William Hung has died. But apparently, that is ‘old news’. The word for it is a hoax according to this. And it is a hoax (or ‘broken news’) that is almost 3 years old. Just where did these people dig up this old fossil? Frankly, would you not have seen it on CNN or even our evening Chinese tabloids by now if such a thing is even true?

I have posted the link from Snopes to both blogs and obviously one of the bloggers who posted this misinformation considered my comment – William Hung is about as dead as George W. Bush – too offensive to pass his moderation standards or he is doing some verification on his own.

Is it a wonder why most people does not consider blogs a worthy source of news and information on the Internet? The reason is obvious when people simply just try to get more attention and visitors to their blogs by posting things that would scream * click me * (which looked like ‘dick me’), but none of them has spent even the minimum effort to do some verification to confirm the truthfulness of the information they are posting! However, I would applaud those who have the common courtesy and responsibility to allow the counter-information to be published so their readers can make an informed decision on what they are reading.

For goodness sake (and I will say this again and again like a broken record), there are enough written material on the Internet to verify if such things are true when you care to look (or when you looked hard enough). Please, verify what you post and don’t spread misinformation!!

And if you are posting something in jest, leave a disclaimer or something so your readers are aware before they get infected by a variant of the ‘forward this to all your friends’ email virus which compels them to send it to everyone on their contact list. After all, a lot of other people also never bother to verify what they pass on to the next reader, who is none the wiser about the truthfulness and authenticity of the information given to them.

I don’t know about the rest of you. But I do not want to misinform my friends or those who trust me, much less complete strangers on the net who chanced upon my blog!