Sure, why not.

Citing a “rumor [he's] heard from an industry insider,” a TechCrunch blogger says Hulu is working on an “iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market.”

OK, well, we’re almost there. We’ll keep an eye out. Thanks for the tip, TechCrunch and its man who is apparently inside of an industry.

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The company will maybe do a limited trial in April for the release of the iPad, FT reports. Because how can you not trust “people familiar with the discussions?”

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Yeah, we’ve fallen behind on updates again. But at least we’re not doing what the Wall Street Journal is doing.

This shot comes from CNET’s Molly Wood. Wood writes, “The death of journalism is nigh when this ‘sourcing’ is on WSJ’s front page.”

Nearly 10,000 iPhone users were accessing the Microsoft employee email system last year, say two people who heard the estimates from senior Microsoft executives.

That’s pretty awful, says one person who heard about the article from a CNET editor.

AllThingsD broke the story that Google planned to cancel an event it was planning in Beijing for the Nexus One. Or rather, wasn’t planning. No such event ever existed in any capacity.

D (or CNET, one or the other) corrected the error, which came courtesy of an equally erroneous Reuters report.

Well done, fellas.

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It’s a lot easier to call bullshit nowadays.

Is that because of all the magical search-and-destroy technologies we have nowadays, or is it because there’s a lot more bullshit out there to step in? Alexia?

BGR says it “hit up a source close to HTC” to get these tidbits about the Desire (basically, the Nexus One) coming to AT&T and the Hero 2 coming to Sprint. The HTC Desire is supposed to drop between May and June, and the genius has no intel on the Sprint phone.

He concludes:

Remember, this isn’t confirmed — the pieces fit together perfectly — but we felt it was worthy enough to warrant a post.

Why did it warrant a post? And why did the boy wait until the end to tell us to take this with a grain of salt? Especially since it was labeled as “breaking news” (news).

(News.)

What makes this even more frustrating is that we have to trust an anonymous blogger citing an anonymous source. What kind of coward has to blog under an alias?

… Oh, right.

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Michael Arrington‘s (in)famed laptop boy is back in the news again thanks to a public, self-inflicted unmasking (prompted by a light anal probe by 1938 Media) of the fellow who tattled on Brusilovsky.

That man is Sam Odio, the CEO of Divvyshot — a photo site or something. See what a lasting impression a TechCrunch write-up has? That’s worth, like, ten laptops!

Odio says the kid kept hounding him about a MacBook Air (still the stupidest computer imaginable). Waa, gimme an overpriced laptop. My mom won’t buy me one! She’s such a bitch.

Odio goes on to essentially give a “fuck you” to Jason Calacanis (rightfully, a douchebag of epic proportions) for allegedly tipping his involvement off to Odio’s second “fuck you,” Loren Feldman from 1938 Media (not a douchebag per sé, but he can get kind of annoying with his whiny, “I love Apple” rants).

Still no word on what company actually did hook up Brusilovsky with a computer.

Picture: Sam Odio

Every point on the rumor sheet ended up checking out — save for the one about launching in September, which can’t be proven or disproven yet; Microsoft says, “Holiday 2010.” The interface does indeed look like the Zune. There’s an app marketplace. Xbox Live integration. Social networking.

This goes to show, if you happen to receive an unsolicited email from an anonymous stranger, go ahead and report it as gospel. Wait, there isn’t a very good moral to this story.

We did, however, appreciate MobileTechWorld coming clean in a pair of tweets to @credibull.

“That’s what I thought first, but given that PPCGeeks seemed to have the same mail,” they said in response to our suggestion that they listen to their guts rather than posting garbage. “I wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t some ‘super inside info source’ and just a mail.”

Thanks for clearing that up.

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Technologizer points out TheStreet.com’s abysmal history of using the headline keyword “exclusive” in place of “rumor” or “we sort of made this up.” TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz‘s integrity is on the chopping block here.

Among them, we see some flimsy rumors about Google, some even shakier ones about Apple and an unusually prevalent thread linked to Verizon. What’s with all the Verizon rumors, Moritz?

We did say we’d ignore the absolute shit-fest that was the iPad rumor bathroom. Granted, there’s some of that in Moritz’s fog, but there’s some other stuff about Palm (and, yeah, Verizon) that’s almost laughable for the simple fact that it turned out to be completely false.

Credibull is already watching a Moritz rumor about a new BlackBerry operating system to come in the spring. We’ll see about that.

Apple pundit John Gruber‘s take: “Moritz is an unscrupulous hack and TheStreet.com is a rag.” Well said.

Michael Arrington

As laughable as Arrington’s horn tooting was, he goes on to qualify his not disclosing the name of the company that traded former TechCrunch writer (not intern) Daniel Brusilovsky a laptop for press by saying they were “the victims of this whole thing.”

Allow us to get on our horse.

The victims were your readers, who were fed a bunch of shit about a company they didn’t need to hear about. It reflected poorly on the company that paid for its publicity; it reflected poorly on the kid; it reflected poorly on TechCrunch; and it reflected poorly on you, Arrington for having something like that happen under your watch.

Plain and simply, Arrington is protecting a company that bribed a member of his organization.

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