Remember that Joel Johnson diatribe on Gizmodo a while back? The site's former editor climbed up atop his newfound position as a columnist to decry tech blogging. All in all, the thing proved more a cranky diatribe than anything else--which, let's face it, is sort of the point of columns in the first place--but one minor point in the piece seems to ring especially true this morning.

Blogs move fast. That's the point of the technology--regular updates, a constant barrage of information, fit for a society fed on cable news and tabloids. We've come to expect, nay demand, such overstimulation from our news sources, and if they fail to deliver, we simply move onto the next tab in our RSS reader. The nature of such on-the-fly reporting is a trial of mistakes left in its wake. Errors occur--constantly. The thing is, they're usually minor enough to be forgotten with the next set of updates, which is to say that they usually don't cost a business $4 billion.

But a story posted on Engadget, the mama of all tech blogs, did exactly that. The site posted a supposedly leaked memo, regarding delays in the release of the iPhone and Leopard. Stock traders may be the only folks in our society more fickle than bloggers, and as such, began selling shares of the company, like rats fleeing from an impeccably designed ship, as the company's shares took a hit: According to TechCrunch, the loss attributed to the post was in the neighborhood of $4 billion. That's a lot of iPod shuffles.

Realizing it had been duped, Engadget printed an in-post retraction, striking through the font of the original post, and stating, in part, "As it turns out, the internal memo Apple employees received was actually retracted by Apple shortly after it was sent out."

There are a lot of lessons to be learned here, one of which is, don't base your entire portfolio on the reporting of a gadget blog. For better or worse, most of our ilk trade in Apple rumors. Remember the months (or was it years?) leading up to the release of the iPhone? "Leaked" pictures and mockups were like crack to us.

The biggest lessons to be taken away from this, however, are on our end. In the short term, blogs will no doubt be a bit more hesitant before posting leaks and rumors, no matter how trustworthy the sources seem to be, and that can certainly be viewed as something of a small victory.

Will it last? Of course not. Remember that whole bit about our short attention spans? Me neither. What were we talking about?

Oh yeah, I'm going to join other folks in calling for bloggers to uphold ourselves to stricter standards. Let's not to be too holier-than-thou, however. Ryan Block, the author of the aforementioned Engadget post, is someone I highly respect--he's one of the best people working in this game. This could have (and likely will) happened to any tech blog. It's the nature of the beast. It just happened to occur on one capable of moving billions of stock dollars. Any sort of grandstanding on the part of competing blogs is simply that. Change starts at home--let's all begin by keeping ourselves in check, and then we can go about casting the blog stones.