ReadWriteEnterprise

I'll start with my disclaimer up front: These are my opinions you're about to read, not necessarily those of ReadWriteWeb. Now, maybe you've noticed this yourself already, but I actually don't read much "tech news" on the Web on a regular basis, besides what we publish here and what some friends and colleagues of mine produce elsewhere daily. There is news about technology and there is "tech news," and most of the time, they come from separate planets.

Many a colleague and some regular readers have read from me, or heard me say, the following: If a pro sports site like ESPN.com were to turn its attention to producing a technology news publication, it could improve the genre immensely. This week, the sports-minded folks at SB Nation are proving me right by providing a new and better platform for Joshua Topolsky and company to produce The Verge, the successor to Topolsky's version of Engadget.

We live in an era where it is feasible to manufacture things that seem like truths, and someone is always in the business of trying. If someone were to leak the entire contents of my active e-mail file, all 4.5 GB of it, onto some public wiki for the inspection of the entire world, folks would marvel at the astounding volume of all the bits of seemingly urgent, potentially life-threatening information I have somehow managed to ignore. There are apparently dozens of fellows who worked at, or for, or near Apple who have taken some secret with them out the door and have launched a startup with it. And it is absolutely amazing, the number of distressed foreign ambassadors who need my help in dislodging millions of dollars from American bank accounts.

You would think there was some kind of automated filter, an analysis system to separate the manufactured truths from the real ones. Indeed, industrious programmers are working to build systems that do precisely this. The problem is, more industrious folks are working even harder to devise methods to thwart such systems. The fake facts industry is becoming more clever than the real facts industry.