Great post. I don't think there will ever be an accepted answer to all of the issues raised, but I normally consider anything I read on a blog to be opinion, hopefully based on at least anecdotal evidence.

But I had an experience a few months ago that concerned me: I saw a series of articles and overviews of conference presentations making a number of statements of fact. There was no test data to back it up, but the same claims were being made by a number of people, some of whom are considered reliable authorities. The thing is, the information presented didn't seem right to me, so I ran some very simple, non-scientific tests, and my data indicated that all of those articles were simply wrong. I wrote an article about it (with my data included), and I've commented in a number of places where the information I believe to be erronneous was posted, but it's been ignored for the most part. If enough of the right people say something is true, it's just accepted as true, it seems.

Whenever one of us cites "facts" it's very important to have backup. Aside from any heightened responsibility marketing "responsibility” we might have there can be legal exposure for not telling the truth, being careless, or misrepresenting facts.

Absent credible backup for positions we stake out in our posts, it’s always best-practice to delineate fact from opinion.

heh. Donna and I must have nothing better to do on a pretty Sunday afternoon than to try and save the blog world, LOL

I added a link to your blog post in the Cre8tiveFlow piece that points to the forums thread on all this.

Thank you, all, for standing up and talking about this.