Interesting excerpt:
The hoaxer, it seemed, had exploited the trickle-up nature of online information flow. The blog comments fooled the blogs, the blogs fooled the news sites, and the news sites fooled the magazines. When the Times came to Bugduv, his story was resting on a pedestal of widespread acceptance.
Seems like culture-jamming. I bet we are going to see a lot more of this as time goes by. Blogs are here to stay, and mainstream press can't put the-internet-as-a-source genie back in the bottle.