Annemie Peeters affair with Vincent van Quickenborne: the Twitter experiment

If you look at my TwitterFriend statistics (found via Kris Hoet) you'll notice a few things:

• I send about 8 replies per day and get about 17 - both twice than average.
• I get about 8 replies per day (average: about 4)
• Half of my tweets are replies to other tweets. I think that's a perfect balance.
• I post about 6 links per day, while the average is around 2. 37% of my tweets contain links

Judged from this Twitter profile it's safe to say I'm a linkdumper. I use Twitter mainly to share interesting links, and to collect feedback and ideas from my Twitter followers.
Which is why it was kind of un-typical for me to Tweet a rumor (or a twitterscoop as Houbi called it) like this one. The people mentioned in the Tweet, Belgian ICT Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne and radio journalist Annemie Peeters were in on it and all was part of an experiment by Radio1. More (including audio links) over at Steffest and ImkeDielen (both in Dutch).
The experiment was a succes (yes, news spreads quickly over the Twitter network) but much more interesting were the conversations that started from there. Discussions about the relationship between journalists and politicians, about conversation manipulation, about my trustworthiness as a source of information, etc.
This morning Bart De Waele and I were invited in the Radio1 programme Peeters & Pichal to discuss the experiment, and I liked the way the presenters tried to involve the discussions going on on Twitter. What scared me a bit is the almost tangible rage of some of my Twitter friends, who were greatly annoyed by the whole set-up. To them, I sincerely apologise. I was wrong when I assessed the whole situation and had not expected the Twitter storm it caused today. I hope that they don't hold their grudge. And I will never swear again.