CBS has shown the door to the blogger who tweeted an erroneous report of legendary Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno’s death last weekend.

Blogger Adam Jacobi wrote on Friday, “I had an awesome 17 months with CBSSports.com. I’m sorry to everyone, most importantly the Paterno family, for how it ended.”

He followed it with this message:

The fiasco began last Saturday when Onward State, an online publication run by Penn State students, tweeted that Paterno had passed away. The 85-year-old coach was previously reported — and confirmed — by many news outlets to be gravely ill with lung cancer and in the hospital.

The @OnwardState Twitter account posted this: “Our sources can now confirm: Joseph Vincent Paterno has passed away tonight at the age of 85.”

The story quickly spread online as an attributed rumor, while many news outlets held off on reporting it as fact. But CBSSports.com tweeted that “Joe Paterno has died at the age of 85.” The message was ostensibly sent by Jacobi, and did not name a source.

The false reports were soon debunked by the Paterno family. Joe Paterno died the next day.

Onward State‘s managing editor resigned from his position shortly after Paterno’s family denied the premature reports.

Jacobi’s dismissal announced Friday is not the first time CBS has cut ties with a blogger over erroneously tweeted reports. In September, blogger Shira Lazar was let go after tweeting that Steve Jobs had died. Jobs died the following month.

Media commentator Alan Mutter, who writes the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur and is a former newspaper editor and Silicon Valley CEO, said that the recent propensity of false reports like the one that cost Adam Jacobi his job are symptomatic of today’s perpetually in-motion news cycle.

“It’s been a great tradition in the news business to always want to be the first with the most, but the problem is that the traditional latency between news gathering and news production — the different editing layers and time it took to actually go to the press and things like that — is gone today, ” he told Mashable.

“The good news with tools like Twitter is that we have many more people contributing to the conversation,” Mutter said. “But if they’re wrong, or especially trying to mislead or missing the facts, then that’s the price we pay for instantaneous communication.”

What’s more important to you — the speed or accuracy of news delivery? Do you think people such as Adam Jacobi deserve to be fired, or do large publications like CBS deserve equal blame? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Media, sports, Twitter

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It isn’t just the sun’s radiation storm getting all up in Earth’s face this week. An asteroid the size of a school bus, discovered mere days ago, came about five times closer to us than the moon Friday.

The good news is an asteroid that size would have burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The bad news is there are still plenty of larger near-Earth rocks we haven’t discovered yet — and we may not discover them until they come flying at us.

Asteroid 2012 BX34, after all, had plenty of company. It was the 873rd space rock detected by NASA in the last two weeks. Only in the last couple of days did we discover that its orbit would bring it within one-fifth of the distance between here and the moon — which is just what happened at 10 a.m. EST Friday. In cosmic terms, that’s a hair’s breadth. (Check it out in the video below.)

Had 2012 BX 34 been larger — the size of a mountain, say — gravity may well have put it on a collision course with our planet. At that scale, given mere days to prepare, we may have been looking at a Deep Impact-style scenario. We can only hope that the next civilization-ending rock we detect isn’t quite so keen to meet us.

Suddenly, President Obama’s priority for NASA in the next 10 years — to land astronauts on an asteroid — makes a lot more sense. Not only are there trillions of dollars in mineral wealth in those rocks, but the more we get to know them, the better we can detect and deflect their orbits.

[via Space.com]

Bonus: 23 Must-Follow Twitter Accounts for Astronomy Lovers

1. @NASA

A convenient feed for all things NASA, including launch news, astronaut updates, space discoveries and interactive media.

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More About: Asteroids, space

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A lot of digital ink has been spilled about Twitter’s announcement that it can now censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. The move has prompted a growing number of users to organize under the hashtag #TwitterBlackout and pledge to boycott the service on January 28 by refusing to tweet. But these users are misguided — Twitter’s new policy is actually good for activists.

For a number of reasons, Twitter’s new policy is a win for freedom of speech advocates. The first thing to keep in mind is that Twitter’s guidelines have long said that, “International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.” According to last year’s official blog post on censorship, Twitter did already sometimes take down tweets that were deemed “illegal.”

Most or all of those removed tweets so far have, it seems, been related copyright violation takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S. The takeaway here, though, is that Twitter’s rules have always allowed them to remove illegal content at the request of governments, and they never said they wouldn’t. So what has changed? Technology and transparency.

The new censorship technology announced by Twitter allows the company to block tweets or users on a country-by-country basis. Previously, blocking tweets had to be done globally, meaning if an oppressive regime asked Twitter to remove a tweet or block a user, it had to be done for everyone in the world. Now, Twitter can remove that tweet in that country, but allow the world to see it.

But wouldn’t it be better for activists if Twitter just refused to comply with requests from oppressive regimes? Actually, no.

If a government asks Twitter to remove an offending tweet, the company essentially has two options: Comply and block that single tweet or user in that country (while still allowing the rest of the world to see), or refuse and risk the government itself blocking Twitter for everyone in that country. So which seems better for activists? I’ll pick the former any day — it still allows activists to speak to the world at large and draw attention to their treatment. That’s something Reuters’ Anthony DeRosa posits could be more powerful.

Further, because Twitter has promised to increase their transparency about takedown requests, it should become easier for activists to monitor which countries are censoring their citizens. As NPR’s Andy Carvin noted on Twitter, every social media platform faces these same sorts of requests. Twitter is just being more transparent about how they deal with them.

But what about Twitter as an organizing tool? Surely this will make it impossible for protesters to use online tools like Twitter to organize, as they did during so many uprisings and political movements in 2011. There are two reasons to be hopeful that Twitter’s censorship policy will not have an appreciable impact on the ability of people to organize locally using Twitter.

First, Twitter’s technology appears to be easy to circumvent. And further, Twitter appears to clearly be telling users how to get around its censors.

Second, activists are smart. They always have been. Last year in Libya, for example, opposition leaders reportedly used coded messages on dating sites to avoid detection by secret police. A Twitter spokesperson has indicated that the company will only block tweets or users “in the face of a valid and applicable legal order.” In other words: Twitter won’t just block a user any time a government asks, so activists should still be able to communicate on the network, assuming their tweets don’t run afoul of local laws.

At face value, when a company announces plans to censor its users at the behest of governments, it is alarming. But when you dig down into what Twitter announced, it is actually a win for freedom of speech and a long-term benefit for anyone who fights for openness and democracy.

More About: censorship, features, law, Opinion, Social Media, Twitter

Now that it looks like Facebook is (finally!) going to file for an IPO, plenty of potential investors want to know how they can get in on the action.

Mashable is not a financial publication, and we’re not in the business of giving stock market tips. But we can break down the IPO process — and gauge the likelihood of a regular investor getting in on the ground floor.

Don’t Get Your Hopes Up

We’ll cut to the chase — unless you’re a close personal friend or relative of a Facebook executive, or you manage an enormous amount of capital, you have almost no chance of getting IPO pricing on a stock like Facebook.

Why? Well, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) points out, “the underwriters and the company that issues the shares control the IPO process.” The SEC doesn’t regulate how these primary shares are allocated.

In Facebook’s case, the Wall Street Journal reports that Morgan Stanley will likely be the lead underwriter for the IPO, with Goldman Sachs also expected to play a large role.

These investment banks are going to target large customers and institutional investors. The goal is to move shares by the millions, not the hundreds or thousands.

Even if you have an account with Morgan Stanley or Goldman, you’re probably not going to get to make any purchases as an individual — not unless you are a big-time celebrity or business mogul. (Ashton Kutcher, it’s your lucky day.) In most cases, the underwriter will call you and let you know if you can get in on the action.

What Can Average Investors Do?

Aside from buying pre-IPO shares on something like SecondMarket — which, again, has some basic financial requirements that will exclude most individual investors — investors interested in a Facebook IPO have a few options:

• Buy into a mutual fund that invests in IPOs. There are a few of these funds in the market, such as the Global IPO Plus Aftermarket fund from Renaissance Capital. The returns on these funds tends to be flat, however — and with a stock like Facebook, it’s unlikely that this fund will get much of the action.
• Buy on the aftermarket. This is where it can get tricky. Putting in a market order the day a stock opens can be risky. In fact, many retail investors were burned during the dotcom era for moving too fast on IPO stocks that never again exceeded their order price. Placing a limit order or stop market order can help alleviate some of the risk, but it won’t guarantee a buyer a piece of the action.
• Watch from the sidelines. Sometimes it pays to take a step back and watch the market from afar before jumping in. An IPO Facebook could be the next Google — but there’s also a chance it could also be the next Yahoo. Wait and see.

Check out the video below to learn more about the IPO.

Image courtesy of Flickr, GOIABA (Goiabarea)

More About: Facebook, facebook ipo, investing, ipo, trending

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You know what hurts? Being wrong, that’s what hurts. Not just a little wrong, but $85 billion wrong.

Five years ago I laughed — dare I say chortled — over the idea that Facebook was worth $15 billion. Now it’s queuing up for the biggest Initial Public Offering in tech history, at $100 billion valuation. Man, do I feel silly.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal Friday, this long-anticipated stock moment is happening next week. Looking at Facebook’s recent moves, I can believe that: They stopped secondary trading, then went from gradually rolling out Timeline across the globe to saying “it’s coming now to everyone! You have a week!” Just prior to that, it unveiled a new collection of Timeline Apps just to show it’s serious about this whole Facebook Platform thing.

This Facebook, the one I and nearly a billion others now use, is almost unrecognizable compared to the 2007 version — a three-year-old social network that accepted a $240 million investment from Microsoft in 2007. Back then, it was really just a place to connect with old friends.

We early users shared random updates, but there was nothing about Facebook that made it a must-visit destination. Random ideas, such as giving people $1 virtual gifts, bordered on silly. The big social interactive moment revolved around actions like Poke — a far cry from the Facebook gestures unveiled last year.

Back then, I had already seen lots of social platforms come and go. Remember Second Life? It was incredibly hot. Remember MySpace? Hotter than hot. Both services still exist — in deflated, post-hype forms.

The Facebook rise, though, has been different. I wasn’t just wrong about Facebook, I deeply underestimated its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook users may often complain about Facebook changes; I call it the “Who moved my furniture?” effect. But like a shark that must move to survive, Facebook’s’ steady stream of updates and innovations have not only kept it alive, but growing effortlessly. It is a global social shark, gobbling up new users wherever it swims.

Five years ago, I could never have anticipated Facebook’s growth or its transformation into platform for doing things by yourself and with friends. Facebook wants your activity (reading, watching movies, listening to music, tracking a State of the Union speech) on the network, live, when you do it, so others can engage in real time.

Users may grouse about the privacy implications of frictionless sharing, but there is a reason Zuckerberg made it this way: if it’s easy, it will be done. Saying “yes” once instead of a thousand times is the difference between walking through an open door and pushing your way through a rosebush. One is easy, painless and repeatable, the other is death by a thousand cuts.

Facebook faces hurdles, to be sure. Increased competition from Google+ and Twitter is likely forcing the IPO moment. Plus, the government and vocal minority will not stop pressing Facebook on privacy issues, and I do believe that growth in its home market has slowed a bit.

On the other hand, $10 billion — the amount Facebook will see from this IPO — is a lot of scratch. Yes, some people will get very rich, Zuckerberg in particular. But the chief Facebook Geek has said he’s not interested in the wealth, and I believe him. For Zuckerberg, winning has always been more important than money.

I expect a lot of that money to get poured back into Facebook. We’ll see new innovations and an acceleration of the Facebook-as-platform program. Acquisitions should increase, and Facebook may even expand into full-blown content creation. I can see it now: The Facebook TV network!

Over the years, I’ve watched many companies transform when they went public. Microsoft’s IPO in the mid 1980’s not only helped create a bunch of young millionaires, it also helped turned Windows from a disappointing also-ran into the world’s dominant operating system.

In other words, all things are possible when you have money, and Facebook is going to have lots of it. And I’m willing to admit that it’s worth it.

Do you believe the social network — or any tech company — is worth $100 billion? And what should Facebook do with the money when it gets it? Ponder with us in the comments.

1. General Motors

Headquartered in Detroit, MI, GM owns Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC.

Proceeds: $23.1 billion

Year: 2010

Image courtesy of Flickr, Crouchy69

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More About: Facebook, ipo, Opinion, Top Stories, trending