There have been a number of examples in recent weeks of how lies hit the ground running on the Intenet, and it took some time for the truth to catch up.

From the NYT:

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday. ...

Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.”

Now, what will U.S. conservatives have to say about this? They loathe his column. 

I suspect the following speaks for many:

The Nobel Prize has become a sad, sad joke. Last year Gore. Now this.

The propensity for voters, in the U.S. but also Canada, to make ballot box decisions on the most trivial of criteria can turn those societies in a direction they really don't want to go, argues former Canadian diplomat-turned-academic Kimon Valaskakis.

From the Washington Post:

September was a great month to write about politics on the Web. The Los Angeles Times had an all-time-high 137 million page views, The Washington Post topped 320 million, and both Slate and the Huffington Post set their own traffic records. It's tempting to give Gov. Sarah Palin credit for these new waterlines -- she's ubiquitous on every site's most-read lineup, among the most blogged-about people in the country and far and away the most searched-for political figure in America. Then again, September was also a great month for newspaper sites in 2006, with Democrats poised to retake both houses of Congress and no spunky Alaska governor on hand. So how much credit does Palin deserve for driving page views to the media elite she so disdains?

Quite a bit. Even in the midst of other major story lines -- total financial catastrophe comes to mind -- data from the Web analytics firm Hitwise suggest a very real Palin Effect. One of the clearest ways to measure this is by focusing on search engines. Slightly more than one-third of Palin search queries drove traffic to news and media sites, according to figures provided by Hitwise general manager Bill Tancer. Fox News received the largest share of these search referrals at 1.12 percent, followed by Time at 0.98 percent. Many other publications received at least 0.1 percent -- nothing to shake a stick at, given the torrential interest in Palin.

NYT public editor Clark Hoyt finds stunningly little reportage on actual policy in his newspaper's coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.