Much of the weekend (including the fake workday - Friday) was spent discussing pretty well two things - the SXSW party conference that everyone and their bother seem to be going to and the Arrington/TechCrunch “we’ll see how it develops” disclaimer post about the imminent sale of digg.com to either Google or gawd forbid Microsoft.

While it turns out the big event at SXSW was the keynote interview disaster of Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy even more attention was building around the faux purchase of digg.com. It has reached the point that WSJ.com blogger Kara Swisher has called Michael Arrington to task over his lack of due diligence in fact checking his post.

Now to be fair to Michael - he has never hidden the fact that due diligence isn’t part of the TechCrunch ethos. For him the philosophy is to get the rumor story out there first and then let the follow-ups take care of themselves. This might be all well and fine for a blog network like TechCrunch but it can do irreparable damage to other bloggers who are trying to build up reputations as viable news outlets. Not that Michael probably gives a shit since they are still rolling in the cash flow; which only increases with posts like the one on digg.com - whether right or wrong.

As Michael points out in a follow up post on this whole thing the digg fanboys are kicking it into high gear in an effort to ruin any possible sale of their personal playground. Now I have never been a fan of digg and regardless of how big and important the diggers may think they are they actually do very little goof for anyone other than the big blog networks who love the page view effect on their advertising rates. For the rest of us regular bloggers we live in fear of getting hit by a massive digg effect because it might trigger Google’s click bot warning system which in turn can cause us harm with Google.

Personally I think the best thing that could happen is if a company with some backbone did buy digg. Such a purchase could turn a potential money machine into a reputable news filtering service; which is in total contrast to it’s current pimply teenage daisy chain wild west show of childish elitism. Sure a purchase by a company like Microsoft would supposedly drive off the digg fanboys but one has to wonder if that would really be that bad of a thing to happen.

Either way Arrington’s rumor reporting and the ensuing digg uproar of the day does nothing more than shine a bad light on the rest of the blogging world who do try to make sure of the facts of their stories rather than make us look like stringers for the Enquirer.

Conversation Tags: digg.com, Microsoft, Google, TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, WSJ, Kara Swisher