We tend to believe that we have a natural instinct for the truth but the web has many inaccuracies that are commonly held to be factual. We can follow the old journalistic principle of getting at least two reliable sources for important pieces of information, but much of the internet is a mash up of other bits of the internet. The resulting multiplicity of sources might suggest a breadth of knowledge but in reality if a factoid is convincing enough it can spread.
Wikipedia is amongst the most reliable of sources because the content is genuinely the result of multiple entries, sometimes hundreds of them. Even Wikipedia has been guilty of significant errors – often the result of malicious editing. Prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler was incorrectly named as a suspect in the assassinations of both President John F Kennedy and his brother, Robert for example. The false information was the work of a man called Brian Chase, who said he was trying to trick a colleague at work.
A common error is that of the false obituary. It has even been know for false obituaries to be published on on separate occasions. Pre-written obituaries of entertainer Bob Hope were accidentally released on news web sites on two occasions and Pope John Paul II was the recipient of three separate reports of his demise. Other widely duplicated falsehoods on the internet include a report that Barack Obama is a muslim and that Bill Gates is giving away his fortune. This sort of widely distributed misconception is not the preserve of the Internet, for example the Great Wall of China Is not in fact nor ever has been, visible from the Moon, but the internet provides a distribution network that spreads these inaccuracies more widely and more quickly.
It is not just facts that are manipulated and distorted, the prevalence of powerful image manipulation tools means that photographs can not necessarily be trusted either. Even the celebrated news agency Reuters came under fire for this when in 2006 it published doctored images of an Israeli air strike in Beirut.
This entry is adapted from ‘Public Relations and the Social Web’ available from Amazon.
Whether or not the current outbreak of swine flu translates into a world pandemic, we are already seeing information and and data spreading around the web at a staggering pace. 
Viral marketing is the idea that you can harness social networks or other communications channels to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve product sales using a ‘viral ‘ process that mimics the spread of infection. The origins of the idea are probably linked to the concept of computer viruses that spread from machine to machine seemingly unaided.
The term cybersquatting was coined when websites first became publicy available. People would buy domain names using company or brand names or the names of celebrities and then try to flog them back at inflated prices. A similar thing is now happening in social networks but potentially the outcomes are far more damaging.
A fierce debate is playing out as to what skills are best suited to the conditions created by a digital world to which everybody has access. The era of single message mass marketing is coming to an end. In a presentation to 250 marketing and advertising executives in New York in late 2007, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “for the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation and they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”
To those that worked in the ivory television towers of the late 20th Century the encroaching loss of control over TV content must feel like the barbarians at the gate. However the battle for influence and control has always been there. British politician Tony Benn foreshadowed many of the current changes in a speech he made in 1968. 
To search the internet Google must first be able to index it a process that involves continuous updates. The first Google index to be announced in 1998 estimated that the Internet already had 26 million pages. 
The rules of engagement for PR people have changed with the arrival of user generated content. If media owners no longer entirely control the content then the principles of PR must change. The Guardian newspaper has been a prime movers in adapting its product on line. The recent attacks in Mumbai proved that at the outset there will always be individuals closer to the action than journalists. The Guardian has made it possible for these individuals to add material and for it to be viewed alongside the work of more conventional journalists. The commentisfree element of the site the newspaper also permits anyone to add their individual views and opinions. The Guardian receives over 10,000 postings a day to their site. This ceding of control by papers means that PR people need to extend their contacts beyond those with journalists. 
