Oh blogosphere, how I love thee. Thy divine ability to create hype is truly, uh, divine.

So yesterday we started seeing some posts on several sites, who I will spare the linkage, that announce Firefox 2.0 Alpha has been released to the public. I don't know where this rumor started, though I can tell you that it's gone as far as Slashdot - which, for once, is not the first place I saw the news. Fortunately, Slashdot has quite a few astute readers who note the truth in their comments.

The truth, however, is that they've simply made the branding change in CVS but have not made a release. In his post on mozillazine.org, Asa Dotzler says, "When we make a new release, we'll say so." In other words, if you don't see the news on Mozilla.org or Mozilla.com, it's not news yet.

Something tells me this is the product of people always feeling the need to be the first to report something.