Google should give the kid a job in advertising.

As an editor of my high school newspaper, I'm offended that someone with such bad grammar could issue a press release and be believed.

Or maybe it's just the obsessive-compulsive coming out in me. Eh.

Woah there, mighty High School newspaper editor. It's very feasible that something with such "bad" grammar (IMO there's not much wrong with it, but I guess I need to be some sort of editor to see errors) can be posted on a wire service and generally believed to be true. If you read CNN as much as I do, you'll see constant typos and grammar no-nos. This is the internet, not the Holy Bible or the dictionary. Not everything needs to be perfect.

Dan said:

"If you read CNN as much as I do, you'll see constant typos and grammar no-nos."

That's sort of the point here, Dan. Shouldn't CNN be more professional than that? I've seen that sort of thing on a lot of "professional" journalism sites and I'm just appalled by it. SOME standards would be nice, wouldn't they?

I wouldnt want to be incharge of flaw's in his grammar.

haha, sweet, museum of hoaxes. I found this while searching my name on yahoo. My name is blacklisted from google so i was forced to use that. Also, when I want to I can use fine grammar. I was only intending to fool friends, not the whole internet.

Honestly it's not really a big deal. As long as it's not like LoL a PlAeN cRaShD tOdAeY!!1 then it's not really that big of a deal. Moreover nobody really cares unless you really have nothing better going on in your life that you need to nit-pick.

What's great about this hoax is that the Google news service itself distributed the fake news release.

It reminds me of what Daniel Schorr said several years ago:
"The Internet has in effect made everyone a publisher, but unfortunately, very few of those new publishers have bothered to hire editors."

Your article itself is a hoax, or at least rather wrong on several facts.
From the kid's blog in question:

After searching my name on Yahoo!, I found one of the most misleading story's possible. There are several mistakes in this article that really made me laugh :D

"1) They spelled my name wrong. Haha, I really hate that, they spelled my name wrong. It just makes me mad, maybe cause for years whenever someone calls my name they always have pronounced it Tom Vandetta, but its Tom Vendetta. Vandetta sounds like the name of a Van Dealership thats involved in the mafia. Anyway, we all make mistakes [haha].

2) They seem to have made up some information maybe? Or maybe they didnt make it up, maybe they got this from there sources. But the article states

"His parents are changing their phone number and he is working to re-establish a workable online identity. On the brighter side, he has received a few emails from Google employees assuring him he has not dashed his dreams of one day working for Google, as he thought he might have."

There are a few problems with that. Up until last night, I didnt even tell my parents. They were totally out of the loop. Whenever someone would call regarding it, either A) They werent home or B) I told them it was a prank call. This story hasnt been THAT big that so many people were calling my house (lets keep it that way). The statement that a few Google employees have contacted me is only half true (only one so far, if you work for google drop me a line =] )."

There is one point to having high standards in journalism: it makes it easier for kids to learn grammar at school.

For example: if most of what you read uses apostrophes correctly and consistently, then the rules your teacher explains for their use make more sense - you don't have to understand the rules so much as absorb the patterns of usage. But if you're always exposed to inconsistent usage, you have to either learn the rules or just give up.

Learning good grammar by copying is soooo much easier than stuffing rules into your poor brain!

That's not true at all, at least for everybody. Everybody has different ways of learning, that's no question about that. I learned my grammar by actually paying attention in school, not by the internet. If everyone learned their grammar from the internet, everyone's grammar would be getting worse, so that's bunk. From blogs to instant messaging, the internet is filled with abbreviations and lazy spelling.

It is getting worse, Dan. The trend started when publishers began using electronic proofreaders instead of human ones; by now even professional signwriters don't proofread their work properly - or don't know how to. Standards are a lot lower than they were 30 years ago, in both professional publishing and personal writing.

Of course you didn't learn your grammar from the Internet; you wouldn't have a chance to! That's my point.

In terms of the fake press release, it's done rather well so I don't see why you guys are throwing a hissy fit over it. It's fine, the world is not ending, there is still order in the streets, take deep breaths,

and

chill

out.

Who's throwing a 'hissy fit'? We're just remarking that it's a sign of the times that even a poorly-spelled, ungrammatical prank posting gets uncritically picked up and relayed to the public. It's indicative not because the lad's grammar is poor - that always has been and always will be commonplace - but because people are increasingly unable to identify poor grammar when they see it and often fail to identify spelling errors to boot.

Being unable to write clearly is a disability, of course, as it hinders expession; being unable to recognize errors is a liability for different reasons. For one thing, spelling and style can be used to discriminate between good information and bad in an information-rich culture: as one example, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes are a very effective first-stage filter in identifying phishing schemes. Literacy also remains a reliable (though not infallible) indicator or education and thus spelling and style can also constitute a first-stage filter in judging the credibility of a source.

This case is a case in point: the spelling and grammar should have alerted even the slackest editor to the probability that this was an amateurish posting.

Oh, and when it comes to grammar on the Internet... there are reliable style guides out there (hehe!).

Still whining. Alot of whining if I may add.

Heh, I think the turn this very innocent thread has taken is more then funny.

Seriously. These grammar nazis are hilarious, they make it sound like society is about to collapse.

It is about to collapse. OMFGZ RUN~!