UPDATE! "I heard from a friend of mine that her mothers' hair dresser's brothers wife's cousin knows this guy who said that he was at a bar once when he heard a woman tell her sister about the time her husband's brother's plumber's wife ... "

You've heard this before: wild unsubstantiated gossip passed through a dozen people to arrive in your inbox or ear. It's always lacking enough information to make the source identifiable. It's often the fodder for Fox News, or the National Enquirer, and now, this very column.

But this time it isn't an urban legend about someone who died from eating Pop Rocks with a Pepsi, or someone who saw Jerry Mathers of "Leave it to Beaver" fame die in 'Nam. No, the victim of this rumor is Yahoo's GeoCities, the popular homepage community.

Swirling around in newsgroups and e-mail and getting a lot of people angry and upset was this piece of misinformation:

My hubby is a Community Leader for Geocities. He just got this in his email today. Geocities WILL BE CLOSING! All the websites will be DELETED and CLOSED! They will be NO WARNING as usual, that's just the way Yahoo! works. So, if any of you want to keep your website, you will have to back it up and save it, and move it to a new web hosting place. This is not a internet hoax, my husband got this from his boss, it could happen in a week, it could happen in about a month. My hubby said to tell as many people as I can, so that you will not lose your site, and so you can be ready to move it to another place.

Geocities WILL BE CLOSING! All the websites will be DELETED and CLOSED! They will be NO WARNING! So, if any of you want to keep your website, you will have to back it up and save it, and move it to a new web hosting place. This is not a Internet hoax, my husband got this from his boss, it could happen in a week, it could happen in about a month. My hubby said to tell as many people as I can, so that you will not lose your site, and so you can be ready to move it to another place.

This is part of the memo he received:

"Yahoo! executives declined to specify which areas of its service will be affected by the cutbacks. In general, however, the company said the only areas spared would be those that directly produced revenue advertising, services to businesses and its new fee-based services for consumers."

"Big areas of its site like the Geocities service, which lets users build personal home pages are NOT part of this new, narrower focus, even though they contain some advertising. They will be closed."

For the record: This is NOT TRUE. Net4TV dusted off the Rolodex and gave Yahoo!, owner of the GeoCities homepage community a call. A spokesperson said, "That is completely untrue."

"GeoCities is and will continue to be a thriving online community," said Mark Feldman, senior producer of Yahoo! Publishing, who works with the GeoCities property.

So, there you have it. You can stop forwarding that one to everyone you know because someone out there is having a laugh at GeoCities' expense. Before forwarding things like this around and getting upset, count to ten and ask yourself: 1) Who is saying this? 2) Why are they saying this? 3) If it's true, why don't they say who they are? 4) Does this make sense?

Now it's true that a lot of things in life don't make sense. And the news media, and sometimes this publication, is partly at fault for publishing stories with out attribution. Many times, company spokespeople and even executives (You know who you are, you cowards!) don't want their names attributed to quotes, even on routine issues. For example, in this article, we requested a source for attribution and weren't given one outside of the media relations department. As a result, people are used to hearing true things without knowing the source. Denying attribution can also provide a company who has to answer unpleasant questions a way to discredit the story, even subtly. But this doesn't appear to be the case at Yahoo.

In this case, we have a wild unsubstantiated and unattributed rumor that GeoCities is closing down. But it's strapped to a quotation from a "memo." Actually, the quote is from a New York Times article dated April 12, 2001. (A free subscription is required.) This part appears in the Times article:

Yahoo executives declined to specify which areas of its service will be affected by the cutbacks. In general, however, the company said the only areas spared would be those that directly produced revenue — advertising, services to businesses and its new fee-based services for consumers.

Big areas of its site — like the Geocities service, which lets users build personal home pages — are not part of this new, narrower focus, even though they contain some advertising.

It's easy to overlook the flaws in hoaxes because often, they prey on your worst fears. Recently, Tripod knocked the legs out from under thousands of homepages with the most evil piece of software since Hal in 2001.

Also, the news of GeoCities' parent portal kicking hundreds of employees in their yahoos, along with reports of their struggle to make money from porn all still fresh in people's minds, it's not difficult to believe that like all the other Dot.coms, Yahoo! might have to cut a few things.

WebTV users are particularly sensitive to homepage issues. They have no easy means to preserve the results of the hard work they put into building their homepages. Unlike a computer, WebTV has no place to back up files. Users must rely on a dwindling number of services on the Internet; and most of them require a subscription. So this rumor seems to be custom made to play with those fears.

One particularly odd thing about the second message is the quote from a memo. First, no mention is made of who sent the memo or to whom it was sent. The memo is not included in its entirety. And the quotes are third person, and do not originate with a Yahoo!/GeoCities employee directly. Even in the quoted material, the source is not evident and the conclusion seems to be drawn from an inference, rather than a direct statement.

So you have a vague paragraph of the article which bolsters the claims of a fuzzy paragraph; both are taken as a whole to support a claim that is never made in the original article, assembled by an unknown person.

[Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect the origin of part of the rumor. Also added is a discussion of the role the New York Times article plays in making an otherwise weak rumor stronger, and the effects of unattributed sources. Also added was attribution from Yahoo!--Dex]