The word came down from the BBC early Tuesday morning.

Mattel, one of the companies that makes the popular board game Scrabble, announced it would be changing the game’s rules for the first time in its 72-year history. Proper nouns such as places, people, or companies would now be allowed.

Throughout the Web, bloggers uniformly condemned the decision as a signal of the dumbing-down of our culture. The outrage was palpable.

There was one problem, however. The initial BBC report, along with similar reports in British outlets such as the as The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, was misleading. Scrabble was not changing the rules to its classic board game. It was issuing a new game- Scrabble Trickster- with these new rules, and only in the U.K. The original game would remain.

Before that became clear-within hours of the erroneous reports-bloggers sprung forward to object. Nearly a quarter (23%) of the week’s links in the blogosphere April 5-9, related to Scrabble, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The reaction displays two traits in new media. First, the speed at which information circulates on the Web and how hard it is to dial back once out there.  

Within hours of the posting of the BBC report, hundreds of bloggers had already voiced their objections online.

By the end of the day, the correct story emerged but was not as widely disseminated as the initial article. Almost as many bloggers continued to disparage the supposed rule changes even after the corrections had emerged.

The strong response also displays another trait among bloggers-fast and strong reaction to cultural change. Whether about a Tropicana packaging, privacy rules on Facebook or efforts to charge for streaming music online, bloggers have demonstrated an intense skepticism to changes made by corporations that would affect their lives (even if in less than monumental ways). They have found a way to add their voice, and strongly, to decisions that until now were largely made from within.

The second-largest story on blogs last week (at 22%), receiving almost as much attention, also elicited outrage.

Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell (R) issued a proclamation that April will be Confederate History Month in his state. The decision, along with the document’s exclusion of any mention of slavery, was roundly criticized as insensitive. A few bloggers, even a number of conservatives, focused on the political consequences for McDonnell and Republicans in general.

The next two linked-to stories had multi-media components. Third at 10%, was a slide show of the Washington Post’s annual Peeps Show diorama contest where more than 1,100 participants entered their 3-dimensional works of art made of candy. This year’s winner was inspired by the movie "Up." (A similar