Speculation Frenzy

Here's the story. There was this Google employee, Mark Jen, who was blogging about Google. He said some things that were on the less than favorable side about his employer. His site was discovered and linked to. Then it was gone. And the speculation began. Everyone got into the speculation action from John Battelle to Google Blogoscoped (check out the Technorati cosmos search).

Anyhow, it just turns out that Mark had just screwed up and posted some financial information he shouldn't have. He explains in his latest post:

i goofed and put some stuff up on my blog that's not supposed to be there. nothing serious and they didn't ask me to take anything down (even the stuff where i'm critical about the company). i'm learning that google is understandably careful about disclosing sensitive information, even vague financial-related things.

I found this interesting and I'm not completely sure why. I think it's about the speed that speculation travels within this network. I also wonder what the negative effects of this kind of speculation could be. In this case everything looks like it turned out alright, but I imagine this kind of frenzy could cause some serious problems for someone in the not too distant future.

Unfortunately I don't really have the brain power at the moment to explore exactly how. I'll leave that up to anyone interested. Just thought I'd pass along the info.