The story of a woman who blogged about the pregnancy and birth of her terminally ill baby, later for it to be discovered that the whole story was a fabrication, broke last week in the Chicago Tribune.

A naturally emotive subject, it attracted a huge number of visitors who sent messages and gifts to the woman who identified herself as either “B” or “April’s Mom”.

Her blog was linked to by high-profile parenting blogs and, apparently, advertisers were also looking at getting involved on the site. read more

Are you a stickler for spelling, grammar and syntax? Have you ever turned away from a blog or website because you found a factual error?

gooseGrade Survey: People Care About Typos and Factual Mistakes on Blogs and Social Media

Do your blog readers care whether you can spell Barack Obama?

A 2008 survey conducted by gooseGrade, a crowdsourcing editing tool for bloggers and social media content creators, tried to find out how much consumers of new media content really care about typos and factual mistakes. (See TechCrunch’s database entry on gooseGrade.)

The survey had 175 respondents and resulted in data such as the following: read more