If Forbes magazine was looking for some attention from the Internet, they certainly got what they were asking for. Unfortunately, it isn’t coming because of some fine-quality, well-written journalism, but because of what bloggers are taking as a drive-by-shooting style rant about how bloggers are dirty, rotten, lying scumbags. The piece by Daniel Lyons is more or less about a battle between one man whose company and stock were hammered by a blogger who pretended to be someone else, but along the way Lyons casts some aspersions against bloggers as a whole. Reaction (not surprisingly) has come from far and wide, including Dan Gillmor at Bayosphere, Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion, the guys over at We Break Stuff and Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed. Is it a deliberate attempt by Forbes to get some coverage in the blog-o-sphere — even if it’s negative? Perhaps. Or it could just be that publisher Malcolm Forbes got a bee in his bonnet about blogs for some reason. Meanwhile, Chris Pirillo notes sarcastically that magazines also suffer from some of the same problems. But Om Malik (who used to work for the magazine before he moved to Business 2.0, says he is reserving judgment for the moment.
Update: In a great piece for abcnews.com, Michael Malone — former editor of Forbes’ ASAP technology magazine and long-time Silicon Valley observer — talks about blogs and notes that the business magazine is the “one of the best technology counter-indicators I know.”