Blogs showed their ugly sides once again today, with their failure to check facts and taking baseless speculation for fact.

Screen shots emerged of a new Google product called Google Base. The information to some seemed to represent a new online classified advertising service – especially because it offered to "post" information about several categories including "vehicles".

Not being stopped, the false prophets once again started their lie machines. Even The New York Times' John Markoff couldn't resist.

If only they had taken the effort to check their facts and visit the official Google Blog, where product marketing manager soon revealed that the service in fact allows publishers to submit information to the search engine to augment the information that Google already collects with its spiders.

Oops.

PS: Markoff actually quoted from the Google statement, but did so in a way that very much questioned its contents.

Tags: google, blogosphere