Read this article or your dog will die in 4 days: Publicity hoaxes on the Internet

Have you heard of a dating portal which allows you to upload your profile, search for your soul mate and even sets you up on a free date? Or a wireless Internet service that is flushed down the toilet and works through your sanitation system? If your answer is no, then you probably are from a cross section of net users who can be safely called The Lucky Few. But a publicity hoax that even The Few might never have survived is The Chain Letter. This annoying piece of forward claims it has survived countless decades without being broken and if you commit the blasphemous task of breaking the chain by not forwarding it to all and sundry, either the apocalypse would befall you or worse, you might not win the "exciting free gift". On the Internet a lot of publicity stunts are wrapped in rhetoric or Web jargon like the company products give away hoaxes, threat chains or free stuff chain letters, sympathy letters requesting you to look for missing children or requests to help someone.

• Free gift and holiday lures
• Chain letters
• Innovative publicity moves based on a certain theme, issue or product
• False health hazards warnings
• Unfounded reports and articles
• Sympathy letters asking for charitable donations

Certain companies come up with innovative publicity stunts around April fool's Day or Halloween, keeping with the theme of the holiday. Such stunts are so creatively thought out and humorously presented that the user is more entertained than offended. There are jokes and specious product launches doing the rounds that people enjoy as a good April fool's Joke. Or stories about haunting of Windsor Castle and ghost spotting software that uncannily pops up around Halloween, which are too far fetched to be taken as anything other than a creative publicity hoax. Every body likes a good joke. The problem arises when the joke is taken too far and the user ends up feeling like a complete fool.

Though some of these publicity hoaxes are done in jest, certain attempts are born out of malicious intent. Certain websites and Emails pleading with you to donate to a charitable cause require you to fill up 25-page forms and ultimately lead to a dead end. The basic outcome of this could be that a person would never let his benevolence get the better of him and actual starving children in some Third World nation could be ultimate sufferers. There are websites which raise a huge hue and cry over alleged inhuman cultural characteristics of certain ethnicities. The utter lack of sensitivity and regard for the diverse cultural variance around us could not be made more apparent as more often than not these are hoaxes are created by some intolerant fanatic or viewer starved web page developer. Websites begging you to help with finding missing kids or warning you about conjured up health hazards featuring doctored images and statistics are no better, either.

The Internet is a limitless resource. The keyword here is limitless. Nobody can be restricted from using the Internet. Clever and amusing hoaxes are well appreciated and even looked forward to. But annoying Email forwards and false information passed around on the Internet is increasingly deterring Net users from viewing the Internet as a resource of information. All that every Internet user needs to make sure is that he or she uses it responsibly bearing in mind the importance of the Internet as a seamless asset.