February 24, 2007

| The Magician Turned the Whale Into a Flower >>

An interesting thing happened at Jim Romenesko’s Starbucks Gossip site recently: Somebody slipped Romenesko what appeared to be an internal email from Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz. Romenesko posted it, with the caveat: I have no idea if this is real.

Soon after, its legitimacy was confirmed, and now it’s been covered by the big guys. (It’s actually a pretty interesting story — Schultz is warning that Starbucks has lost its way.)

But before that happened, Starbucks Gossip readers were hashing out the likely legitimacy of the email on their own. If you read some of the long comment thread, you get an awfully good snapshot of web-ified group discussion today: smart; informed (most of the commenters are Starbucks baristas!); opinionated; and, er, often wrong.

No specific conclusions from me (maybe you have some?) but I just thought it was a data point interesting enough to share.

(Starbucks Gossip is great, by the way — I think I might read it with more excitement than I do the other one these days.)