It was a big news day! Xbox Live is getting new Mii-style avatars (pictured blurrily above); Forza 3 will ship on two discs and have a hundred tracks; there are sequels coming to Marvel's Ultimate Alliance and Transformers; Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, and System of a Down will appear in Guitar Hero 4, which will have a fancy new button-free guitar neck; Microsoft's Lips will compete with Sony's Singstar; Tony Hawk's name will appear on a game with a motion-sensor balance board gimmick; Xbox Live will put a new emphasis on casual-friendly social games; there's a console emulator for your PC in development and it's called Trioxide; and the cover art for Call of Duty 5 and Spider-Man: Web of Shadows could be any one of five options with various minor differences. Plus, Wii Yoga!

You've probably seen these "announcements" making the rounds, the most trustworthy of them accompanied by an official "no comment" from the company involved. But you weren't supposed to know these things. It all began when someone leaked images of an online survey from the market research company Intellisponse to Joystig's Xbox 360 blog. The blog naturally posted the story with links to images from the survey.

But then someone from the gaming forum NeoGAF hacked into Intellisponse's site. Well, "hacked" is a generous description. The intrepid NeoGAFfer merely noticed that if you manually edited the URL, you could bypass the site's login information. This happened at around noon on Sunday. Over the course of the next five hours, Intellisponse's marketing surveys were freely available to snarky gaming forum posters. The fierce three-headed NDA that should have been jealously guarding the info was effectively bypassed as people blithely skipped over the following message: "Copying this information is in violation of your Legally Binding Agreement of Non-Disclosure". The original forum thread is a noisy but entertaining read as the posters gradually realize just what they've discovered. The phrase "feeding frenzy" comes to mind.

One thing important to note -- and largely lost on many of the sites posting NeoGAF's findings as news -- is that Intellisponse is a survey company. They're not a developer, a publisher, or even a PR company. Many of the supposed "announcements" could simply be trail balloons, feelers the publishers had put out to gauge potential customer responses from controlled surveys. For instance, a list of 14 Spider-Man games is most certainly not a release list, but a set of prospective titles to be tested on a target group.

Of course, many of the stories are certainly reliable, and you're likely to hear some publishers fess up over the coming days. But at this point, about the only thing that's certain is that someone at Intellisponse had to go into work on Sunday and shut down the web site.