There's a lot of shoddy reporting out there, and I'm thinking it was high time we rounded some of it up and laughed at it (as it deserves) or simply slap our foreheads in dismay (as much of it engenders). There's a couple howlers out there at the moment, and it's time to put up the white sheet and shoot them.

One of the ones that's really making some waves right now is from news.com.au. It is, what Second Life users would generally describe as a steaming pile of Shirky. It's really that outrageous.

This little jewel is entitled "Virtual Terrorists", by Natalie O'Brien, described as a senior writer. She should certainly know better.

This piece appears in a couple of forms throughout the news.com.au network, in one it contains a correction to their assertion that the ABC island was devastated by a bomb, while still leaving the original assertion in place.

The article header says: The bomb hit the ABC's headquarters, destroying everything except one digital transmission tower. The force of the blast left Aunty's site a cratered mess.

Most of the way down, she then writes: The ABC has discovered that its bomb was a computer server error that it was able to fix within a couple of hours.

While she's on the topic of bombs: On screen these blasts look like an explosion of hazy white balls as buildings explode, landscapes are razed and residents are wounded or killed.

Wounded or killed! Really! "In Nissan's case, its online officials cleaned up the mess, took away the bodies in virtual coffins and continued business."

When you stop laughing, I'll still be here. Of course it's not possible.

Long on errors, and short on accuracy, I'm afraid I have a hard time finding anything correct in this article (O'Brien can't even get Linden Lab's name right). The few genuine pieces of fact are really rather unrelated, and seem to be strung in to prop the whole thing up. This one's worth a good laugh.

Next up, The Register, who reports "Second Life will dwarf the web in ten years - so says Linden Lab CEO" written by Cade Metz.

Metz says, "Within ten years, virtual worlds will be bigger than the Web itself. So says Philip Rosedale, the man who invented Second Life."

There's just one tiny problem with that. Rosedale didn't say that.

Rosedale did say (according to Metz), "In ten years, virtual access will be more prevalent than web access". Now, you know and I know that that's not nearly the same thing.

Tech.co.uk's Anna Lagerkvist picks that story up from The Register, and says "Second Life will be bigger than the internet itself in 10 years' time".

Holy chrome! An Internet-based service that's bigger than the Internet? The Internet must be some kind of crazy TARDIS. Lagerkvist, of course, has made the beginner's mistake of mixing up the Web (an Internet-based service) and the Internet (the thing that it runs on/over). Or maybe this was just supposed to be hype. Worth a good laugh, either way. Maybe we can make a drinking game out of this.

Ireland's Silicon Republic's Marie Boran does a better job than Metz or Lagerkvist, but totally botches the title with "Second Life CEO predicts end of web". The rest of the article is workmanlike enough, so that title has got to be pure hype. The kind that smells.

If any others catch your attention, do let us know, and we'll round them up so that we can all have a good laugh at them together.