A Good Reason to Take a Glance at the Comments Section if You Run a Blog, or Even a News Site; or: Hey CNBC, Let Your Commenters Help Fix Your Typos

I saw this late yesterday afternoon when looking over the financial news:

Wait a minute, you think — I knew Groupon is a big deal (or used to be, at least), but $568 billion in revenues in the second quarter? Billion with a “b”? That would rank Groupon in the top 70 countries for GDP.

Okay, of course not. It should have read $568 million, with an “m.” Hey: people make mistakes, no biggie.

But here we are many hours later and, as I type this, the CNBC article remains uncorrected even though many commenters have pointed out the mistake (some quite kindly, others less so).

Try as we might on this blog, we regularly make mistakes of all sorts (and will continue to do so, I promise!) but inevitably an alert reader will point out the error in a matter of minutes. Then we get to correct it quickly.

To them: thanks!

To CNBC: you should take advantage of your readers similarly.