With government agencies, news organisations and others putting more and more information online, some mistakes are inevitable, but hardly unique to the Internet, said John Pavlik, executive director of Columbia University's Centre for New Media.

"We're seeing an effort on the part of both journalists and the government to try to get more information out, and that's a good thing because we're better served by having more openness rather than a more closed system," Pavlik said. "Of course, there are going to be some mistakes along the way."

Thursday's gaffe by the US labour department, which sent startled bond traders scrambling, joined a litany of other infamous Internet mistakes, including the ABC news network releasing"results" of Tuesday's election on their Web site on Monday and an accidental Associated Press dispatch in June announcing the "death" of entertainer Bob Hope.

"The Internet hasn't created any kind of new situation," said Nora Paul, an associate specialising in online journalism at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. "Nobody would say before the Internet that newspapers always printed only the most factual and up-to-date statistics. It's just another kind of outlet for the same kinds of human errors."

The labour department and ABC mistakes came 50 years after the Chicago Tribune told its readers "Dewey beats Truman" in the 1948 presidential election.

Paul said the Internet has allowed people all over the United States to access information previously available only to lawyers and lawmakers in Washington.

The Library of Congress's Thomas system at http://thomas.loc.gov, for example, lists the text and status of every piece of legislation introduced in Congress.

"The beauty of theWeb is as soon as it's out of the oven it can go on the web," she said. "You don't have to be in the Beltway to have access to some of this stuff that was pretty exclusively available only if you were physically able to get it."