While there can be wisdom in groups, there can also be tremendous ignorance in groups. To blatantly rip off despair, inc., none of us is as dumb as all of us.

Never has this been clearer than the past couple of months -- a time that makes one question the real wisdom of the masses, and whether many accolades/ diggs/ arrow-ups/ mods is really a good sign of worthy content, or whether it's just an expression of the ignorance of crowds, or a real-world demonstration of low-value groupthink.

During this period we've heard - from virtually every "news propagation" site, all bombarding the same messages - that Google was releasing an amazing new online office suite. Turned out that it was really just the optional bundling of the Java runtime with the Google toolbar (because bundling is always in the consumers' best interest...).

We heard that Microsoft was buying Opera, and then that Google was buying Opera, both of which were untrue (and both of which are hard to rationalize with reality given both company's commitment to competitive alternate platforms). Both originated at very small sites, and were supposedly based upon "insider" tips and info (let's ignore the thorny legal issues about making such a claim regarding the acquisitions of public companies). They were quickly picked up and relayed by countless other sites.

Many of these completely nonsensical stories gained a sort of "truth through repeated assertion": The more sites picked up the same nonsensical story, the more people used their "votes" to give it more visibility, the more real some completely baseless meanderings on someone's blog or commentary site became. These stories took on a life of their own, and if you debated the validity of them, you'd get a laundry list of links to sites all repeating the same fabrication.

This same sequence of events played out among the Riya-fanboyz, many of whom blanketed the meme sites and blog ranks with unsupported claims that Google was buying Riya. In that case, if you followed the "source" back to its origin you would find two bloggers, each pointing to the other as the source of the rumor. Given that the vast majority of bloggers get their "news" from other blogs, this is hardly surprizing.

This is such a predictable event now that you can guarantee lots of hits, and good frontpage action on the meme sites, by simply sticking to the tried and true and claiming that Google is doing X. What is X? Whatever you want it to be. Whether it's running movie theaters, releasing an ultra-low margin PC against any common sense, amazingly building an entire operating system against all precedent, or continuing the Google Office Suite rumor (which includes such hilarious pearls as "GMail's WYSIWYG is 90% of Microsoft Word") -- Savvy bloggers and small-market "news" sites know that it's a sure thing to just imagine up whatever ridiculous concoction one can invent involving Google, and it'll quickly disseminate across the web, earning tens of thousands of links (glorious pagerank), reputation, and traffic that one can redirect to one's own personal projects and businesses.

What starts as baseless, or barely-educated, speculation quickly turns into reality as it propagates.

I've picked just a few of the most known nonsensical stories that took the community sites (both the editorially controlled like Slashdot, and the true community sites like Digg) by storm over the past months, but there have been countless others where someone posts unsupported anecdotes or personal attacks and it quickly jumps to the front page, eagerly given credibility by, in all truthfulness, the clueless: You don't have to know what they're talking about, or even bother reading the supporting "evidence", to help promote a site on these community sites. On some of them nefarious groups have been busy script-creating accounts and voting up their own stories, not even waiting around for the ignorance of anonymous, detached groups to do its thing.

There really isn't a point in all of this, but to say that readers need to consider most of the group think sites more akin to the World Weekly News than the New York Times. While there will be occasional gems, there is a tremendous amount of noise as well.