Higgs in the blogsphere

In January a blogger, John Conway, who works on CDF at the Fermilabs Tevatron collider posted about a 2 sigma bump that may, or may not be the Higgs.
This is really interesting to me, not only because it may be the first observation of the Higgs, but because it was reported in the blogsphere. Most people still believe that scientific discoveries occur in a "Eureka" moment, but that is not the case. By sharing the story as a blog the method by which scientists arrive at the truth is also shared something that many people, among them the well educated, have no sense of whatsoever.
Another recent story which illustrates this point well is the story of Pentaquarks, which I have been part of in a very small way.
Pentaquarks particles made up of 4 quarks and and anti-quark, if this means nothing to you then think of them as like protons and neutrons but heavier, and not stable. they decay almost immediately into other particles. In the 60s people kept finding new particles and they were all classified as mesons (a quark and an anti-quark) or baryons (three quarks) but no other combinations were found. Which is odd, if you think of the elements, they are made by putting in more protons and electrons so Hydrogen is a proton with an electron, Helium is 2 protons, 2 neutrons and 2 electrons and so on. But the baryons and mesons just have 3 or 2 constituent particles. Furthermore, the underlying mathematical theory (QCD) of these composite particles, as we understand it at present, allows not only pentaquarks, but all kinds of other things, but so far we see no evidence of them.
Inspired by some new theoretical predictions the LEPS collaboration at SPring-8 in Japan looked for these pentaquarks and observed a small but statistically significant signal, they were closely followed by the DIANA collaboration and others. However some experiments looked and did not see any evidence for this new particle, and gradually, throughout 2005 the negatives overtook the positives. One particular experiment, which had seen the pentaquark signal looked again using more data specifically gathered to look for the pentaquark, but could not reproduce their earlier 5.5 and 7.8 sigma results.
It may look like the question is answered but this is not yet the case, DIANA published further evidence in 2006 for the pentaquark, althought this is the only recent positive evidence. It seems so incredibly unlikely that so many different experiments would see such similar (although in some cases not similar enough!) results and that it is a statistical fluctuation in each, but I am aware that there can be problems with reflections (seeing ghosts of other particles) in these particular cases, although I don't know the details, also, all the positives were small statistics experiments and it has been argued that the significance was overestimated.
A further important point is that even if it turns out that there is no narrow pentaquark it does not mean that the work done has no value, the pentaquark has reinvigorated the field of hadron spectroscopy and inspired new theoretical work into bonding between quarks in bound states to name just two important side-effects.
It illustrates well how science works, it is not a clear path to the truth followed by infallible, objective automatons. It also makes me quite pessimistic about the 2 sigma bumps seen by CDF, it seems to me they're in a good situation though, although there is excitement they have been careful enough and issued enough warnings that should it disappear with more statistics it will not look at all bad for them, and if it is something interesting and LHC then see something at the same mass then they will have seen the Higgs first.