Ed Bott Tears Boing Boing A New One Over MSFT/Claria Story

Ed Bott does an excellent job calling out Boing Boing on their half-assed attempt at issuing a correction to their rumors-cited-as-facts post about Microsoft and Claria last week. To recap: Microsoft, back on March 31, downgraded the severity of Claria's spyware apps, a major mistake in my opinion. Sunbelt reports that one of their researchers, Eric Howes, discovered the March change in status to Claria apps. So, Sunbelt reported on Friday that downgrades were issued to apps like WhenU, WebHancer and Ezula Toptext. So, it has nothing to do with Claria, and everything to do with a strange (and probably innacurate) grading system.Boing Boing did not issue a correction. They issued what passes for an "edit" at Boing Boing, which is 9 for the slightly corrected but still incorrect version. Boing Boing appears to have a very irresponsible and inactive corrections policy, refusing to remove incorrect stories and not seeking out the facts when it has gotten them wrong. Based on reports in various places in the media, I easily knew the story well before Boing Boing reported it, so why didn't Boing Boing get the message. It is things like this that make Boing Boing look more like a "fun blog" and ineffective as a news source. Does Boing Boing have fact checker, or an experienced news editor on staff? I realize it is a blog, but as one of the top blogs in the world, pulling in 2-3 million hits a day and earning a lot in ad dollars, they have a responsibility to hire someone to catch stuff like this and fix it before they embarrass themselves. (via Findory) Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog.