United Airlines stock took a dive this week, and in 15 minutes lost close to $1 billion in value. The reason? The Chicago Tribune regurgitated an old article detailing the bankruptcy they faced in 2004. Not bothering to fact check, double check, or check at all, holders of the UAL stock sold right away triggering a massive dumping and reduced the stock to garbage. The error was quickly discovered, and United Airlines rebounded (almost) back to where it was at the beginning of the day.What I'd like to examine is how closely tied our 'up to the minute' live feed, RSS, direct news, google reader, XML, active delivery world IS-- to the part of the world that has our money? It turns out that it was google, erroneously tagging a date to the story that made it spit back out to everyone (including those like Bloomberg and Reuters) and it's these mainstream services that stock brokers/traders/investors/etc get their news from.
What if you're the CEO of United Airlines, and now all of the sudden you're answering for things that have absolutely nothing to do with you. A newspaper in Chicago said something 4 years ago, google picked it up today, and now you've got a PR nightmare-- even though you're really fine...
I'd like to imagine this on a micro scale, and look at this as though United was a person. So my friend United is going about his day, then all of the sudden, his girlfriend dumps him, his boss fires him, his landlord evicts him, all seemingly for no reason. I finds out that it's because the newspaper printed an article about his uncle (with the same name to make the story work) from 30 years ago about getting busted for pot. Even though the paper can retract, and everyone can forgive, this guy now has a lot to deal with...
In the world of the web, where reputation management is so important, people need to be on top of what Google thinks of them, but also they need to be able to deal with errors and omissions. Think about it...