Revision3 Rumors: When Is an Acquisition Not an Acquisition?
March 15, 2008 |
It's Saturday night, and like any tech geek, I'm online, reading news and following the Twitter stream when I see a Tweet that CNET has bought Revision3. Now, this rumor was first floated back in December 2007 when CNET added Revision3 content, and has popped up since then occasionally in blogs.
The source, however, was Robert Scoble, so Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree with the news that Revision3 was bought for $57 million. Tweets from early this morning (1 AM or so on Saturday) claimed that a possible Revision3 outage would be resolved with an announcement, but it was Scoble's Tweet that really kicked things off. Within minutes, I was sifting through two pages on Tweet Scan looking for the original source.
As it turns out, the “source” was an article on a little blog called r3fresh. Unsourced, the article was most likely a late find of the December rumors, and posted only in the site's “sideblog.” I'm sure that the r3fresh folks will be thrilled with their stats for today, but in the meantime, “Scoble says Revision3 sold to CNET” will be passed around for weeks. The story was gaining so much traction on Digg that Jay Adelson himself jumped into the fray, debunking the rumor.
In his later Tweet, Scoble admits that he didn't confirm the story before he posted. In this fast-moving world of news, everyone wants to be the first to break a story, but is it worth it at the expense of fact-checking? Henry Blodget noted this increasing trend of posting stories without verifying the story in his discussion of Kara Swisher's bashing of TechCrunch's coverage of the alleged “Digg for Sale” story. I'm still more inclined to believe Kara's version, if only because I think most start-ups with any degree of success or notoriety end up hiring someone on to field offers for them, although I'm not sure of her valuation for Digg, noting how much Bebo sold for.
In the overall scheme of news, though, what's more important to readers? Reading it first, or reading it right?
