Seth Godin takes the blogosphere to task for mob justice:
One of the side effects of the massively many-to-many publishing model that is the blogosphere is the following math:
- controversy is fun to write
- controversy is fun to read
- piling on is safe and fun
- undoing 1, 2 and 3 is no fun, hard work and easy to avoid.
When I was a kid, there was a fair amount of mob justice. A bunch of kids would spread a rumour, a posse would appear, ask no questions, beat the crap out of you and move on.
What I find surprising his advice to keep your mouth shut and wait for it to blow over. One of the features of the internet is its permanence. And the mob posts will be there forever, waiting for the right search engine query.
I think you need to make your case permanent as well. That may prolong the current problem, but it will insure that the search engines will return your side of the story as well as theirs.