Digital Wars: The power of the blog post

We're living strange times. The most interesting confirmation that supports this came from the recent "AppleGate" in Silicon Valley. A single blog post from Engadget stating that the iPhone is going to be delayed several months caused a 4 billion dollars fall in Apple's stock price. And it all happened in about 6 minutes. Eventually, the story turned out to be not true and the stock recovered in around 20 minutes (you can read here the detailed story).

This thing makes me think about the awesome power a blog can have nowadays. With all the push-style mechanisms in place (like RSS, Atom and the tons of client apps for them), news travel instantly around the globe. The latency of information delivered throug the blogosphere is by far the lowest we ever had. Just think about the radio and then the TV revolution... what a huge impact they had at that time! Not to mention the more recent Internet revolution. Seems to me that with the growing popularity of the blogosphere we're about to enter in a new phase of the digital revolution. And like any revolution, it will create a lot of opportunities for all sorts of groups of people. Including the ones that intend to speculate on the stock prices.

I think that Apple's example is the perfect demonstration for some of the problems we might face via the blogosphere. It all started from a bogus email (created as a result of Apple's internal email system being hacked) that looked as a perfectly valid one. Looking just fine, it was picked up by Engadget and transformed into "breaking news" on the blogosphere, reaching almost instantly a huge number of destinations. And then, the inevitable happened. Being negative "breaking news", it translated quickly into emotional reactions on the stock market. Final result? A 4 billion dollars fall in stock price.

This event is yet another confirmation for me that the most important thing that influences stock prices is the emotional reaction of investors. Combined with the high speed delivery channel provided by the blogosphere, it can lead to very interesting situations. Which makes me think... are we really ready for the blogosphere revolution? Are we prepared to handle all the consequences? And of course, the big one: are we prepared for the digital wars to come?