"This article documents a current event."

We've all received the emails forwarded by someone you hardly know, a call for help, sign a petition, send money now! In the early days of the Internet, there were a lot of these and many if not most, were hoaxes. I was a regular email user long before many people I know so it wasn't unheard of for me to literally receive the same chain letter for years and years and years. I was always kind of flabbergasted when someone I considered to be intelligent and informed would forward some crap to me. I would look up the letter on the Internet, find out the truth and email the sender to let them know they can stop worrying, the call for help isn't real.

I don't get as many of those types of emails now but I got one today. It was about a kidnapped girl and it was a plea to forward a photo of her all over the Internet in hopes that she'll be found. The email, naturally, was from someone I hardly know so I was suspicious. I looked it up. It turns out it's not only real but has so ubiquitously populated the Internet that when you type in the girl's name in Google, it yields 1,450,000 results! Kidnapped only a month ago, it's been mentioned on 47,251 blogs and has a complete entry in Wikipedia outlining the entire ordeal with up to minute updates.

And yet, despite this kind of exposure that a decade ago did not exist, Madeleine McCann has not been found and there are no significant developments in the case. The reigning theory is that she was sold into a pedophile trafficking ring operating in Morocco. I imagine that this increased exposure still doesn't reach the kind of people who might actually come across this girl. I thought I would become the 47,252nd blog to mention it in hopes that I'm wrong.