Though Goldman never discloses it on air, one of his Apple sources is Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, who previously worked with Goldman at CNBC'S Silicon Valley bureau. Does he have other sources within Apple?

He claims to, as the New York Times notes. He went on air last month, in the clip above, to declare Jobs "fine." And in a recent blog post, Goldman dug himself deeper as he stuck to his story:

All along, sources (and yes, there are several) inside Apple have reassured me that Jobs was firmly in charge, executing his responsibilities, and performing his role as C.E.O. One source, who I have known for years, told me recently that Jobs was 'fine,' and that everything was under control. All of it was fine. And I stand by every word of that reporting. Even today.

"Several" sources: Does that mean Goldman spoke to Dowling, his former colleague, and Katie Cotton, Jobs's personal PR guru at Apple, who has a track record of lying about her boss?

Take this earlier blog post from Goldman, when worries first emerged that Jobs, who had undergone surgery to treat pancreatic cancer in 2004, was skipping the annual Macworld Expo event where he usually delivers a keynote address, because his health was failing:

I can tell you that sources inside the company tell me that Jobs' decision was more about politics than his pancreas. Sources tell me that if Jobs for some reason was unable to perform any of his responsibilities as CEO because of health reasons, which would include the Macworld keynote, I should 'rest assured that the board would let me know.'

Sounds like Goldman has a direct line to the Apple board, right? Wrong. That's the same statement Dowling gave every other media outlet:

If Steve or the board decides that Steve is no longer capable of doing his job as CEO of Apple, I am sure they will let you know.

The only conclusion to reach here: Either Goldman is puffing up flacks as sources, or his sources don't exist.

That's what one former colleague of Goldman's thinks:

Here’s the key to revealing Goldman — he doesn’t have any sources. And his bosses back in New Jersey don’t know that. His only Apple "source" is a flack, Steve Dowling, who once worked at CNBC as the Silicon Valley (off-air) bureau chief.

The question you should raise — does CNBC's managing editor know who Goldman’s sources are? He inflates his bogus persona as a Silicon Valley insider by inventing sources. At any legitimate news organization, if you can use an unnamed "source" your boss must know who it is, by name.

Does CNBC follow this practice? (The answer, as I know well, is: no).

I’ve watched Goldman sit at his desk without picking up the phone for hours, then go on the air and say “I just got off the phone with a source inside Google who tells me...”

He flat out makes it up. He IS Jayson Blair. And he's the only person at CNBC who even tries to get away with it.

Fast Company's Adam Penenberg tried Googling "CNBC ethics" and came up short. We called Kevin Goldman, a spokesman for CNBC, to ask what the network's policies on anonymous sources were — how they were to be used, and whether reporters were obligated to reveal their identities to their editors and producers. (Such is the practice at most magazines and newspapers.)

Goldman (no relation to Jim) said, "CNBC has policies and guidelines that are followed by everyone. And we don't disclose those policies to the public." And he would not comment on the identity of CNBC's sources at Apple.

Blogs are not known for impeccable sourcing. (We call them "tipsters" for a reason.) But at least we're upfront about it — indeed, we're the first to question our sources, often in the same blog post that we cite them. That kind of probing uncertainty makes for a better path to the truth. But it doesn't make good television, and it doesn't fluff up the easily deflated ego of a self-declared "insider."

"Sandvine already counts top U.S. cable provider Comcast Corp (CMCSA) among its customers, Barron's said." - Easing network debate may aid Allot/Sandvine-paper, Reuters, Sun Apr 8, 2007

Here's the orginal Barron's article (subscription required): Here's How the Drama Over 'Net Neutrality End

Sandvine also posted the article in the press archives section on their very own website.

Oops. Hard to play the no comment game when the facts are already in print.

PREVIOUSLY:
LEAKS: Insider Tells Us There's Proof Comcast Contracts BitTorrent Sabotaging To Sandvine
Comcast's "We Don't Throttle BitTorrent" Internal Talking Points Memo

Running outta Vloggies, all true...they played a game of "who is most important", had some list...the people Podtech wanted for their network got them first. Least that was John Furrier's reasoning.

And yes, they then DID get some more, yes.....

But then they put Valerie [Cunningham, PodTech press contact] in charge, Miss Pretty but 10-Second-Attention Span, and I have no doubt she will stick to her guns, saying yes she sent them. She drops more balls than anything, plus it was during the whole move to Page Mill Road, and they were sitting in a box untouched for eons. I was shouldn't those be mailed? But poorly run is right, it was someone else's responsibility, so they remained untouched, while Valerie was off partying, calling it Marketing.

So now it blows up, and they have them left over, insisting they did send them and have more.

1. Conversation: This word excellently described markets in the 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto. It is this meaning — the market as a dialog where the consumer matters, as opposed to a one-to-many broadcast like those in traditional modern advertising — that has been perverted in Newspeak fashion to mean the opposite of itself. The most recent example is the spokesbloggers scandal, in which Federated Media Publishing called the practice of paying bloggers to make advertising slogans a "conversation." In Orwellian fashion, this word attempts to defend a (relatively harmless) old-media practice by implying that the critic of the "conversation" is unpatriotic to the New Media cause.

2. Long Tail: I thought this one died in 2006, until I went to the Supernova Conference this month and heard several speakers say the phrase popularized by Wired editor Chris Anderson. The "long tail" is the trailing-off bit of a power law distribution representing the lower-frequency segment of a market. In a graph of book sales in America, for example, an obscure book would belong in the long tail, while The Secret would be in the "fat head."

The term is not heinous in itself (it describes a common phenomenon with meaningful implications for markets and other systems), but the glorification of what it represents leads to misguided thoughts about business. For example, Anderson may have overestimated how much of Amazon's book sales came from rarely-purchased long-tail titles. Those with something to pitch will find a way to summon the long tail when their business in fact deals with the fat head. For example, human-built search engine Mahalo claims to find more accurate results for the fat head of search (the few thousand most-searched terms) while leaving the long tail of search to Google's algorithms. This claim avoids the argument that Google's searches can handle popular searches quite well, and it ignores the many other factors that go into an ideal search experience (such as relying on one default search engine instead of making the choice before each search).

3. Exciting: Means "not exciting." For a non-tech example, see the Applebee's employment page.

4. Ecosystem: "Facebook Platform creates an ecosystem for developers," says CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Princeton's WordNet defines an ecosystem as "a system formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their physical environment." Facebook applications don't interact with each other (though they could) but only with the Facebook environment. Nearly every application so far released on the site is made for the benefit of its creators and Facebook, not any other app. To break down the definition like this is not fair, but critiquing Zuckerberg's intended implication is. He wants to encourage a community feel among developers, though the actual community is between the users, as he intended. Zuckerberg is interested in developers as a way to get to the users and enrich their ecosystem.

5. Any word in a poll: Marketers want to show numbers to support their claims. Sadly, most marketing claims are bogus, so marketers have to make fake numbers. (Even the Pepsi Challenge is bullshit.) Thus polls that ask, for example, what consumers think about media, asking the man on the street which medium is most essential in their lives. All this measures is perception; a true test of essential media would involve tracking consumers' media habits. While perception matters, results of "what-if" polls like this (where the latent question is "Which type of media could you not live without?") should be far less arresting than actual use statistics. But readers are gullible and polls are cheap.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Look Shiny, and a project that will, he hopes, cut some bull.

WHO: Casey Serin is a 24-year-old real estate swindler entrepreneur who blogged his failure at life in "I Am Facing Foreclosure." He says he's over $2 mil in debt; which dampens the joy of his blog's success (he's earned a few thou from Google ads).

WHO ELSE: Griefers calling themselves "haterz" — you can tell they're an original sort of crowd — joined Serin's site to kick him while he's down. They've peppered the web with parodies and even a Caseypedia to document the whole affair. They've discovered a secret business plan and figured out that Casey's cohort Marty Stewart may be an alternate Casey personality.

IS IT OKAY TO HATE HIM: Yes. Casey is unremorseful about defrauding investors of hundreds of thousands of dollars; he apparently abandoned his wife when he recently fled the country. (The haterz have suggested raising her a divorce fund.)

WHY IS THIS SO FAMILIAR: Casey seems a lot like Michael Crook, who wrote a fraudulent Craigslist post and published private responses with identifying information. Crook then tried to silence his detractors. Like Casey Serin, Crook took on multiple personalities, once calling a critic on the phone and pretending to be his own gay lover.

Photo: Casey Serin

< cskaterun> burtonator finds chicks by snooping their AIM screen names at internet cafes < burtonator> it only works some of the time

< burtonator> its called wardating... and I invented it :)
< burtonator> if Winer claims credit for RSS then I claim credit for Wardating!
< burtonator> thats what I want to go down in history for

< adamhill> burtonator is the creepy guy you always see hanging out at SBux
< burtonator> though thats not a good thing for your current girlfriend to find
< burtonator> :-/
< burtonator> good thing it shows far down on my google query

Lesson learned: Don't say something you'll regret in an internet chat where anyone could log it.

(Photo: Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. Disclosure: I met Kevin on IRC in 2005; I know him in person. Good luck on the Google query, Kevin.)

Illegitimate DMCA notice [.doc file]
Earlier: Please please can you send us a DMCA take-down notice too? [Valleywag]

Oh my god, right? Like the Washington Post totally wrote a whole article about some kids having the usual MySpace problems — creepy strangers, jealous friends, whatever. The paper says this means MYSPACE IS DYING and GOOGLE IS SCARED (actual quote: "The relatively short lifecycle of a popular site is a terrifying prospect for companies like Google Inc.").

The story's just another poorly researched piece of blogger bait. Its point is bullshit — MySpace is not dying. But what's the Post trying to hide?

• A well-staffed newspaper can find anecdotal evidence for even the most obviously fake trends.
• The Wall Street Journal did this story last week.
• Nielsen-NetRatings figures are unreliable. (True.)
• Stat tracker Alexa says the Washington Post is so last January.

In Teens' Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year [Washington Post]

• Business 2.0 Magazine tells entrepreneurs to "sign up customers, then deliver." Which here means "Fake it, then take it" — their poster boy for this idea launches blogs full of rehashed info (okay, we all do that), then takes inquiring readers and refers them to real pros or gets a quick and dirty certification in the area of fake expertise. Sure, it's legal, until the malpractice lawsuits begin. [Business 2.0]
• Wireless network infrastructure renter American Tower doesn't need stock option backdating when it can launder executive payments through subsidiary companies, then "disclose" the extra payments in the fine print rather than in the plain financial report. By the time shareholders know what hit them, they're afraid to complain, lest the stock drops. [Fortune]
• The Pee&Poo plush doll and clothing shop. That's just vile. [Pee&Poo, safe for work]
• And an idea from reader Kevin Marks: Combine Google solar power with Sun's datacenter-in-a-trailer and Edelman's Walmart Across America, and cross the country with a solar-powered datacenter in an RV parked in Walmart lots, serving video to the locals. Actually...actually that sounds so sensible that it'll never work.

The best part: when Walden utters, "You're serious." Poor guy's face freezes in disbelief for about five seconds.

Earlier: SV Confidential: Day 1 wrap-up for the HP Congressional hearings [Valleywag]

In his book F'd Companies, FuckedCompany.com founder Philip Kaplan explains how a 90s dot-com boasted of a nonexistant user base.

SixDegrees.com was also a study in dot-com PR hype—they claimed to have 3 million members, when really, a "member" was just an email address. Users of this site sign in all their friends, who sometimes signed up (after being bombarded with spam), never to return to the site again—yet they were counted amongst the regular users. Righteous.

The site Forever Geek published a brilliant piece today trimming MySpace's user count from 100 million registered accounts to under 50 million users who actually logged in in the last month.

FG also refers to Facebook, the site that "85% of college students" supposedly used — back when the majority of U.S. colleges weren't on Facebook at all.

The takeaway: Don't spread user-number hype without checking the math.

Debunking the MySpace Myth of 100 Million Users [Forever Geek]

According to her gadget spread in Lucky Magazine, Mayer already has two laptops (with a use-anywhere wireless card), a TiVo, a portable DVD player that hooks up to her TV, and she can probably afford that flatscreen and Xbox (to play Tetris, she says) on her wishlist. How is someone who stays at the office past midnight and claims to sleep four hours a night and slog through 14-hour e-mail sessions using all this crap?

Apple unveils new iPods [Mercury News]
Earlier: Marissa Mayer gets Lucky
Photo licensed from Getty Images

Pop quiz: What does a once-popular startup, top-heavy with philosophy and lacking direction, do when the one guy who started the whole thing quits?

Bart Decrem, founder of Web browser startup Flock, has stepped down as CEO and is looking to build another company, PE Week has learned.

Decrem says his departure isn't tied to anything wrong with the company.

Bull. Founding CEOs do not step down and "look to build another company." Decrem knows his social browser failed to catch on, thanks to an already-crowded browser market that left no search deals (like Mozilla's lucrative Google deal) and no consumer demand. Meanwhile, it took $3.2 million from venture capitalists and angel investors.

Look for Flock to end up on the Web 2.0 junk heap in a few months. Hey, maybe it'll sell on eBay.

Flock CEO steps down [Private Equity Week]

Pretexting is lying. Wikipedia says: "Pretexting is the act of pretending to be someone who you are not by telling an untruth, or creating deception. The practice of pretexting typically involves tricking a telecom carrier into disclosing personal information of a customer, with the scammer pretending to be the customer."

It's common. The Washington Post says: "A security specialist said it has been a 'tradition for decades' for chief executives of big companies to hire private investigators to spy on colleagues, calling it a 'common power play.'"

It's easy. "All you need is the last four digits of a Social Security number and a correct ZIP code," a repossession investigator told the New York Times, and "you can view the bill."

It works. Hewlett-Packard's probe outed board member George Keyworth as the leaker who shared important business information with CNET.

It's unethical. At least according to a former president of a trade group, the National Council of Investigation and Security Services, quoted in the Times.

It's illegal. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act outlaws unauthorized attempts to gain personal nonpublic financial information. (Lawyers disagree on whether the ban applies to phone records.) Phone providers view pretexting as illegal and sue those who attempt it. This is why many investigators say they've stopped the practice. A bill in the California State Senate could make the offense a state crime punishable by up to a year in jail.

It got Patricia Dunn and superstar lawyer Larry Sonsini in trouble. As chairwoman of HP, Dunn authorized the leak investigation that included pretexting for phone records. Dunn now says she did not know of or authorize any pretexting. Also, the San Jose Mercury News obtained e-mails in which Larry Sonsini (outside counsel to HP) told former board member Tom Perkins that this investigation was legal.

The phone companies are fighting back. Most notably, Verizon is pushing against pretexters and other dealers in personal phone records. For example, the company settled with a records vendor who agreed to stop selling phone records and to share how they obtained those records.

This isn't the last scandal we'll hear. The president of one security company says that heads of Fortune 500 Companies hire "fly-by-night organizations" to do their dirty investigative work all the time. Now that a pretexting scandal is front-page news, expect investigative journalists to hunt down similar stories.

Pretexting [Wikipedia]
When a Stranger Calls, Beware of The Pretext [Washington Post]
An Industry Is Based on a Simple Masquerade [New York Times]

First, privacy is a core HP value.

MSNBC, Tuesday:

To catch a leaker, Hewlett-Packard's chairwoman spied on the home phone records of its board of directors

Earlier: The HP Way: Chairwoman snooped board member's personal calls [Valleywag]

To calculate the most wired cities, we started with the top markets in broadband adoption as determined by Internet market research firm Nielsen//NetRatings. We dropped cities that didn't crack the U.S. Census Bureau's top 100 list, such as Hartford, Conn. Using the namesake city in each Nielsen market area—which eliminated some large cities, such as San Jose, Calif.—we then calculated service provider variety using the latest available statistics from the Federal Communications Commission. We determined Wi-Fi hot spots per capita from statistics by public hot spot directory JiWire and population estimates.

So Forbes is really listing "Some of America's Big Wired Cities Preferred by Nielsen and catalogued by JiWire." I guess that title didn't seem catchy enough for linkbait.

America's Most Wired Cities [Forbes]

Last Tuesday, I wrote:

Online video startup Grouper (pictured) denies any impending deal with Sony, despite an e-mailed rumor.... The Sales and Marketing VP of Grouper...says the company will not be joining up with Sony.

Last night, TechCrunch wrote:

Sony Pictures is announcing the acquisition of online video startup Grouper tonight, Tuesday, at midnight EST. The acquisition price, confirmed by Grouper, was $65 million in cash.

If that's true, VP Jonathan Shambroom was either:

A) Lying to the press on-record about a business deal, or
B) Clueless about a deal his company was already making.

Grouper has an executive team of six. We're gonna bet on option A.

Wow - Grouper Sells for $65 million [TechCrunch]
Earlier: Grouper denies Sony merger [Valleywag]

In its apology, AOL notes, "there was no personally identifiable data linked to these accounts." But as one activist tells CNET, since most people search their own names, IDing them shouldn't be hard. And once you attach a user number to a name, you can build a nice profile of their search habits.

AOL promises to investigate and make sure this never happens again, which probably doesn't reassure those whose records are already public.

In other news, AOL is offering to host 5 GB of your private information for free! What a deal!

AOL apologizes for release of user search data [CNET]
Earlier: Find the scariest AOL user search record

As part of his duties running Technorati, Dave Sifry writes a seasonal "State of the Blogosphere" report. One purpose is to demonstrate the blog search engine's growing importance as the blog world explodes. Sure, it's exploding, but Dave can't decide how quickly. Watch him magically change the past:

• October 2004: "The slowest rate at which the blogosphere has doubled in size is once every 5 months."
• March 2005: "The blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months."
• August 2005: "The blogosphere has just about doubled again in the past 5 months, and that the blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months."
• October 2005: "The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months."
• February 2006: "The blogosphere we track continues to double about every 5.5 months."
• April 2006: Dave's words: "The blogosphere we track continues to double about every 6 months." No word about this doubling being slower than before.
• August 7, 2006: "Technorati has been tracking the blogosphere, or world of weblogs, since November 2002, and I'm constantly amazed at the growth over the years. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so."

That's right, it's always been doubling every six months. Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia. As the Party says, "Who controls the past controls the future."

State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 [Sifry.com]