During every interview with Barth since late 2007, I came away convinced he knew what he was talking about. On Friday, Kennedy claimed that everything but his identity was legit: Devil Mountain, which is a registered corporation in the state of Florida; the fact that he developed the performance benchmarking software, which had come out of consulting work he did for ; the customers the company had sold its software to; and the data from XPnet. "The research content I've published to date was always based on an unbiased interpretation of the data at hand," he said.

"I even consulted for Microsoft," he bragged during the Friday conversation as Barth, and forewarded a white paper on application virtualization he said he'd written for VMware, and which that company .

Obviously, that's moot now. Readers who scoffed at the data he presented last week have all that much more reason to doubt. Even people who accepted the data as valid, like me, have to wonder where the slippery slope of deception ends.

In the past, reporters could plead the "Don't shoot the messenger" defense, but things are different now. Right or wrong, many people blur the source and messenger into one persona, even when -- as for news reporters at Computerworld -- that's most definitely not the case. Personal experience pieces like this are the rare exception.

Part of a reporter's job is to evaluate the veracity of a source. I did that, but failed, for which I'm sorry.