He might need a Mac

Today's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) reports on a highly topical case of blogger ethics, the online detective work by "Wild Bill" that led to the naming of one of the Congressional pages on the other end of the salacious instant messages with former House member Mark Foley. Will Bill's post is a case study in how one leaves a trail on the Internet, but it did turn on one lucky break: that ABC News had left up a web page without a link but with a url easily guessable from pages that were linked. Then there's the comedy in how Wild Bill's post went public before he gotten a reaction from the person he named --

After connecting the dots, Mr. Kerr ["Wild Bill"] began emailing newspapers and prominent political bloggers on Oct. 3, hoping to make a big splash. He invited them to check out important news he promised to post the next day on Passionate America at 4 p.m.

He had not, however, contacted Mr. Edmund. Mr. Kerr says he called the Istook campaign [Republican for whom Edmund was working], asked to speak to Mr. Edmund but didn't leave a message. He says he was getting ready to leave his apartment around noon on Oct. 4 to drive his rusty, gray Ford Tempo to Mr. Istook's campaign headquarters in downtown Oklahoma City when his laptop PC froze. When he rebooted, he discovered his investigation had been inadvertently published on his blog four hours ahead of time.

Mr. Kerr said it had been his intention to fix spelling errors, try to get comment from Mr. Edmund and add a last paragraph. But there's no taking things back in Internet publishing. Other bloggers had already seen his posting. Soon, other sites, including the widely viewed Drudge Report, linked to his investigation.

To his credit, the spelling errors are still there. Anyway we're not sure of the chain of events by which a PC crash results in an accidental publish of a post but stranger things have happened. For now, it seems that Will Bill didn't use any insider information and, other than having a lot of time on his hands, didn't do anything that another amateur or professional investigator couldn't have done once ABC had made the original mistake. But perhaps those who followed his scoop were disappointed that the unearthed former page seems to be a loyal Republican.