Over the weekend, a blog I had never heard of before (msblog.org) got a lot of publicity for passing along an unsubstantiated and highly questionable rumor that supposedly listed the retail prices that Microsoft is going to attach to Windows Vista.
According to this list, the prices of Windows Vista were going to be obscenely high, with typical prices of $500–1000. The list originally appeared on a German site and was picked up with no questioning by author Dennis Fraederich. Trouble is, it didn’t pass the smell test, with obvious errors and some internal problems that should have been obvious to anyone who looked at it for more than five seconds.
And now, the folks at msblog.org have simply deleted the contents of the original post, changing its headline to read “Post pulled due to public flaming.” The comments from readers are gone, too, available only to administrators of the site.
Now, there’s an interesting strategy. Get something wrong? Don’t correct it. Don’t retract it. Don’t apologize. Don’t respond to your critics. Just pull the post, hide the comments, and pretend it never happened, even though a few dozen other sites have already reprinted the bogus information and posted links to the original article.
Look, anyone can make a mistake. And it’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy to post something that appears to be a juicy scoop. But if you want to be taken seriously as a news source, you have to be willing to take your lumps when you get it wrong. Deleting the post is gutless and a complete disservice to your readers.
Am I going to listen to anything else these people have to say? No. Their credibility is now in negative territory.
Ed Bott 
Is it just me, or has Ed been a tad surly lately? Today we have the anti-correction. Yesterday was our lovely word of the day. A while back it was Google crying about the IE search box. Before that, it was that Firefox rant…
Not that you aren’t allowed an opinion, just seems you’re going rougher on people as of late… I mean, the last time I saw an expletive-laced rant here (pre-Firefox) was… I don’t remember when.
Go take a nap, have a beer… whatever it takes to cheer up a little! 😉 If it’s this bad more than 6 months away from Vista’s release, we’re all going to be ruined when it hits the shelves! 😀
Actually, Chris, I just got back from a two-week vacation in Hawaii. I’m a little jet-lagged today after a red-eye Saturday night and a two-hop connecting flight.
I certainly didn’t ask for Paul Thurrott’s nastygram, and I thought i dealt with it in good humor. I mean, as Zaine pointed out, I didn’t shoot him in the face.
In all seriousness, I try not to dwell on negative reactions to stuff in the blogosphere. It’s easy and cheap. And I think if you go back to the home page here and scroll backwards, you’ll see lots of interesting stuff that isn’t the least bit negative.
But, point taken. I’m all ready for a bunch of good news with the release of Beta 2 this week. Stay tuned.
Ahh, Hawaii… How I miss that beautiful sunny land.
With the jet lag, I can understand getting easily ruffled. And I’m not saying Paul didn’t deserve to get shot in the face, it just occurred to me this morning reading your blog that there seemed to have been a lot more negative stuff floating around it lately. That’s certainly not to say that there isn’t some great content (like the User Account Control stuff) there as well…
Go take a nap and find something happy to blog about. It’ll make us all feel better. 😉
Interestingly, over in the non-geek world, canada.com did a similar thing, removing an article that claimed that Iran was requiring Jewish people and others to wear identifying marks. The deleted article left no traces to a separate article which detailed the subsequent doubt over its truthfulness.
Which means some outlets may never have registered the retraction. Searching Google News for “iran identification” still shows some web sites discussing the — now discredited — original story.
PS. canada.com is the National Post. And Googling for “iran badges” finds more stories.
I would be inclined to give the msblog.org site the benefit of the doubt if it had deleted the comments (assuming a high flame-factor), but then posted a correction in the gist of, “Hey, we fell for it. We apologize for taking the bait without researching the facts.” But now I don’t even find the rewritten post headline on the site.
Hello Ed,
You may know me, my name is Patrick S (from MSBLOG.org). To be honest i could see why you would get upset that we (from MSBLOG) would post an article of this stature without checking it out first-and for this we are truly sorry. The fact of the matter is that yes this has severely hurt our credibility and furthermore our overall reputation to the blogging community etc etc. I apologize for this and I hope you god a good story out of it however Dennis did not remove the post…I did instead because of blogs like this one and on your ZDNET blog, we were in the middle of a humiliating abusing from the tech blog world.
I have taken your comments onboard and we will try our best to promote MSBLOG as a blog that can be truseted with factual information. We will admit we are wrong nex time however it has severely hurt-which prob serves us right but none the less it saddens me-It will take a very long time to build up the status we once had again
Kind Regards,
Patrick S 😦