A hot eruption of Bitchmeme has happened over the past few days starting when TechCrunch wrote a story about Last.fm sending its listener data to the RIAA supposedly to find out what naughty children had obtained the new U2 album early. Such a story obviously was followed by a shit storm of outrage including people canceling Last.fm accounts. The only problem? It wasn’t true.

And Last.fm made that very clear on its blog with a post titled “Techcrunch are full of shit.” Ouch.

Even though I can’t seem to disassociate that title from “All your base are belong to us,” it has stirred up the classic discussion about sources in the age of fast publishing on the web.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld had one second-hand source on the story. He tried for a few hours to get a confirmation or denial from Last.fm, but ended up with a bland, almost no-comment type statement, so he ran the story as a rumor. Of course, even when you run a story as a rumor, it’s problematic. You basically get three types of people who will read this story.

1) Those who read it as a rumor and think it’s interesting, but realize it’s just a rumor.

2) Those who read it as a rumor, but convince themselves it’s true and get all worked up.

3) Those who don’t really read the story and assume it’s completely true.

That last category is the group of people I lovingly refer to as “idiots” — and regular readers will know my strong feeling that unfortunately the Internet is full of them. And because they are such a large part of the Internet, stories spread and morph like a game of “telephone” on steroids. And thus, we get people canceling Last.fm accounts, and talk of lawsuits starting.

It’d be nice if we could banish all idiots from the Internet. But unfortunately, that’s impossible, they outnumber us — greatly.

So the easy thing to say would be, just don’t publish that kind of stuff at all. But that’s easier said than done. Love it or hate it, this is not your parent’s world of journalism. A lot of information is simply coming in too quickly and too hot to sit on it for too long — because if you do, someone else is sure to get it, and believe me, someone else is going to run it.

Should TechCrunch be held to a higher standard because of its size? Maybe. Any rumor they run will amplify that game of telephone quickly. But it’s still a results-oriented business and TC, like other blogs gain and maintain credibility by breaking stories. A bad miss like this will hurt them temporarily, but they’ve probably had many more situations like this where the information turned out to be true, and so they got accolades for it. Duncan Riley (a former TechCrunch writer) makes some good points on this as well.

But I’m also not going to say that TC is blameless here. Schonfeld made a judgement call to run the story as a rumor, but this is a bit different than running something like a product rumor story because this is a pretty damning against the company in question. If the story were true, Last.fm as we know it, might have been finished, or at the very least would have lost a lot of users. So this was a big deal — and is a big deal story worthy of getting more than one source?

I bet if you polled a selection of blogs, it would be close to 50/50 in terms of who would run such a story and who wouldn’t. Like all Bitchmemes, this is a case where it’s not black and white.

But back to the larger overall issue — again, it’s a nice thought that everyone will slow down and not run rumors unless they’re 100% confirmed true, but that has never been the case, and it will never be the case. And now, in the age of Twitter, I think we’re unfortunately just going to have to be skeptical about pretty much everything we read.

I’m sure we’ll hear more about how situations like this prove blogging sucks and blah blah blah. But, as Mathew Ingram notes, no less than the New York Times has gotten in trouble for the same type of thing. As I said, the world has changed.

And that’s not a bad thing. Assuming you’re not one of the idiots of the Internet, blogging and other fast message tools provide you a truly awesome way to get more information, faster than has ever been possible in human history.

I’m not going to lie, just as an observer, I wouldn’t trade the speed for more accuracy. Would you?