So WordPress just released a live blogging plugin and Venture Beat tested it. Yes Venture Beat found a bug, then decided to make some overblown claims.
All’s well that ends well, I suppose, but WordPress would do well to test its new plugins on at least the most recently released versions of the blogging engine before releasing them to the world.
It’s a bit of a black eye, to say the least.
A black eye would have been if the plugin was used to liveblog the upcoming Apple event and the whole post got deleted. The requirements even said that you needed to be running 3.5.
So VB tested something that wasn’t meant to run on the version of WordPress they had and then decided to call out the issue instead of acknowledging that they made a mistake and correcting it.
I suppose that writing overblown articles gets way more pageviews though and the rest of us should overlook that the facts were not actually expressed.
It all comes down to the fact that we are not the customers, advertisers are and they want more pageviews. If the user was really the customer then maybe we’d get a bit more accuracy out of reporting.
2 responses to “Venture Beat Jumps on with Overblown Claims”
Between sensationalist reporting and obtrusive ads (some of which crash browsers on the iPad) I’m starting to think someone needs to create a tech journalism blacklist.
I think we’d be out of most tech sites. They’re all racing for pageviews and throwing accurate reporting and proper analysis to the side.