So just moments before I was about to push “publish” on an article named “CBS is Crazy: I Love Tech, But It Makes No Sense” about how CBS was “going” to replace Don Imus’s radio show (who I presume you know was recently fired for making racist comments about a black female basketball team), with Ed Kohler of Technology Evangelist, which is a tech podcast.

Seems like I was punk’d, though. And it seems like I wasn’t the only one.

I was about to rant on and on about how much I love technology, but how silly, stupid and short sighted this was on CBS’s behalf … blah blah blah … if they were going to go from a mainstream shock jock to a niche-oriented topic, they must have been smoking some fine ganja … blah blah blah … perhaps they’d be better off going with Leo Laporte who is as mainstream as any tech personality you’d ever meet … blah blah blah.

Well, as I said, good thing I caught myself in time, because it looks like a huge joke / hoax.

And as I pause and reflect on my own twitchy blogging fingers, its clear that tech bloggers, or perhaps, all bloggers, are prone to this kind of behaviour. We’ve been criticized before about not fact checking, contributing to an echochamber of opinion, and contributing to a general phenomena of going into mass hysteria at inappropriate times (OMG! Apple’s new dongle is teh haxor!).

All of those things may or may not be true (well, probably more true than not).

But I think that’s the beauty of blogging as well. While we are all prone to going off half cocked when we smell some tantalizing aroma of something particularly dishy (Microsoft alive / dead; Google making another acquisition; Mark Zuckerburg turning down even MORE money for Facebook; a new release date for Apple products; A-list blogger saying something smart / stupid), there is also a self-correcting phenomena where we usually are able to just as quickly turn around and correct ourselves.

It doesn’t always happen, which is unfortunate, but for the most part, the blogosphere does fact check *itself* — if for no other reason than there is a vested interest for bloggers who are able to point out a legitimate contrarian opinion, the incorrect facts, and debunk formerly-accurate news. That is to say, that in an economy of attention (which we bloggers trade in), there is a good reason to fact check itself.

But, it first starts with that piece of news. And at the end of the day, though, the very nature of blogging — news blogging, and I would argue Tech blogging in particular — does lend itself to twitchy bloggers who are dying to get the first word out about that particular issue.

And in doing so, we’re pathetically easy hoax bait if the bit of “news” is plausible enough, or it happens to get enough publicity through a well known news site or a-list blog.

What does this mean for online marketers or SEO types? Well you can add “hoax-bait” as a kind of “link-bait” as a means of content creation to try and create inbound links. As a strategic methodology, we can look to Lonelygirl15 as one of the first really big pieces of “hoax bait” that had the blogosphere in a frenzy trying to debunk.

But on the other hand, its one thing to be done once in a while in a tasteful fashion, and deliberately tongue-in-cheek. Its quite another thing to be done deliberately and purposefully, with nothing but a mercenary goal of links building in mind.

Because that way courts another feature of the blogosphere (often seen in the techie side): the predilection for a public lynching. And if you’re wondering what that feels like, heck, just ask Tim O’Reilly.

Update: blogging hoaxes aren’t new and it seems not limited to online bloggers either.