I liked this essay on Social News: Trading Accuracy for Immediacy. The phrase “Never Wrong For Long” has been used for quite some time in 24hr Newsroom circles – usually as criticisms of “the other guy” – and means the same thing.

An excerpt:

Now that every person and company can virtually not only make it in the news, but make the news itself, we're bound for a bumpy ride on accuracy. There are two challenges in this scenario: 1) is that of standing out in the sheer tide of bits being shared as news in real time, 2) you may not be able to stop or correct inaccurate information once it starts spreading.

Reminds me of Brewer’s Conjecture: When designing distributed web services, there are three properties that are commonly desired: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. It is impossible to achieve all three.