Hologate Is No More

I've watched with fascination as hologate unfolded over the last 40 hours or so. Someone noticed a tiny picture of three men inside the authenticity hologram on the Windows Vista Business DVD. The find led to the discovery of more tiny photos and ridiculous conspiracy theories and word of a hunt inside Microsoft for the villainous perpetrators.

Bink.nu offered up four images—not just the original one—photographed using a kid's microscope. I was impressed.

Like some other blogs or news sites, InsideMicrosoft got a wee bit carried away—and I mean no disrespect to Nathan Weinberg, who blogged:

"I got word from someone on the inside that they are running a query inside Microsoft, that emails are flying around trying to figure out who put the picture in there. That pretty much means this wasn't known until now, this wasn't approved, and there's some level of concern internally."

He gave some good background on Microsoft and Easter Eggs, which would have meant more if there was a conspiracy. There wasn't.

In a post last night on the Windows Vista Team blog, Nick White explained:

"Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that it is not the result of a deliberate attempt to deceive. The photo displays members of the team who worked on the Windows Vista DVD hologram design. Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Team designed a counterfeit-resistant digital "watermark" for the non-encoded surface of Windows Vista DVDs. The photo in question is only one of multiple images contained in the hologram design, all of whose inclusion serves to make it more difficult to replicate a Windows Vista DVD."

The team photo and several others from the public domain "are less than 1mm in size and are not visible to the naked eye, so must be viewed using optical magnification," White continued.

The mystery pics turned out to be nothing more than anti-piracy mechanisms. No conspiracy. No Easter Eggs. No one is getting fired.

Somebody really has too much spare time, and, hot damn, I'd like some of it. What full-time worker has time to blog conspiracy after conspiracy theory?

Companies like Microsoft suffer from all the rampant spinning, spinning, spinning going on in blogs. Origami is a great example of blogs gone wild. Weeks before Origami's announcement, Microsoft hinted at something new, and the blogosphere exploded with speculation. Microsoft meant to only tease, but the hype quickly got out of control. Blogmongers raised expectation way beyond what Microsoft could deliver, sending the blogosphere booming with disappointed posts after Origami's formal unveiling.

How about that leaked fake memo that shaved a few billion dollars off Apple's market capitalization?

Then there is the euphoria over iPhone, which is setting the device up for possible failure. Apple may deliver the best cell phone ever and still fall short of expectations, which the blogosphere has raised up into the stratosphere.

Speaking of iPhone, on Monday the blogosphere suffocated with misinformation about Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg. He used an iPhone as a prop with a Palm Treo during a speech that afternoon. Let me repeat, prop. Later, during the Q&A, somone asked Mossberg about the device, and he said little. But a Chronicle of Higher Education blog post gave the impression that Mossberg spoke about the device at length and hadn't decided whether or not he liked it! There was no context given about the Q&A response.

Like tabloid gossip columnist spin, the tale got longer the more it was told. MacNN wrote about Mossberg's first impressions, which he didn't give. Valleywag took Mossberg's out-of-context answer to speculate that he might give the device a bad review. C`mon, get a life.

Another example: Last week, Sun's CEO reportedly said that Mac OS X Leopard would use the ZFS file system. That claim set off a bonfire of blog posts and crazy conspiracies. I did a little reporting and found out that the file system would be available in Leopard, but not as default and in limited fashion. I didn't blog, because my reliable sources close to Apple contradicted Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

It's time to stop the madness, or at least for people to stop believing so much of what they read about company and product conspiracies. I used to laugh at my grandma for buying trashy tabloids at the supermarket checkout. No reasonable person could possibly believe true those outrageous stories about alien babies born to human women or Elvis sightings.

Is the blogosphere really that different from those tabloids? Wild rumors about high-tech doodads are little different than supposed alien or Elvis sightings. Too many blog posts spread gossip, conspiracies and urban legends. "Well, so-and-so on the InterWeb said, 'Blah, blah, blah.'"

By the way, fact checking is much more than seeing how many other bloggers say the same thing.

There are many responsible blogs out there, and even some very credible blogs will make ocassional mistakes—same can be said of news organizations. The outrageous post generating big clicks could be short-term gain, long-term loss. Today's Digg is tomorrow's ding, if the blogger loses credibility.

Some advice to bloggers: Be smart. Be certain. Be right about what you write.