Final word on Scoble Vs Orlowski

I’ve been meaning to write something on this for a little while, but – alas – the pressure of real work (and a fun weekend) meant it didn’t happen.

I’ve been corresponding with Robert Scoble via email and the comments section on this blog about the controversy over whether Robert had, in fact, seen IE 7 eat up toolbars from Yahoo and Google. Robert kindly forwarded me the original email he sent to Chris Coulter, which, it appears, ended up with Andrew in a version that was, to put it mildly, doctored. Given what Robert has said about it, I’m certainly convinced that he’s in the right on this one. I don’t, however, believe that Andrew doctored the email – I’m fairly certain that was done by someone else, and Andrew simply took the email as genuine.

However, that doesn’t excuse the fact that Andrew didn’t check with Robert that the email was genuine before posting something on The Register. It’s a journalism basic that you check this kind of stuff before putting it in a story. At the very least, I think the Reg should respond to this one, publicly. They need to sort this out, rather than fronting it out.