Somali Cruises - Cruise along Africa's east coast!

Somali Cruises - Is this the best internet hoax ever?

I keep reading about these pirate-killing cruises, with references to "several reliable media sources." Only one problem. Those media sources all appear to be wrong. The source page is a joke web site, and a pretty obvious joke at that, but it continues to get reported as fact, in the internet equivalent of repeating one of those "I heard it from a guy in a bar who heard it from his Uncle Ike, who saw it on TV in the Netherlands" stories.

There was an even more spectacular example this weekend of the internet's ability to misreport. I read somewhere about Gov. Palin having resigned because of upcoming ethics indictments. At one point, Google was returning the top story with "9000 related articles." I tried to find a credible one, looked at maybe 50, and every single one of them was utter bullshit. The supposed ethics problems were the same ones that were widely reported (and went nowhere) during her VP run, and the FBI even said outright that there was no such active investigation. Everything traced back to one blogger in Alaska who quoted a supposed inside source, and that ballooned into a story. Turns out that the inside source was just speculating (and rather ignorantly, at that).

Then, to make the irony truly delicious, the same people who treated Palin unfairly got all huffy and condescending when she accused the media of treating her unfairly, even though they had just proven her 100% correct!