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CNET cofounder Halsey Minor, in discussing a lawsuit Sotheby's filed against him for nonpayment of art he bought at an auction, says that we should route around PR people and get the story straight from him. If only Minor could keep his own story straight. Check out how, just over a month ago, he recapped his career for the Baltimore Sun:

I ran my company, CNET [a Nasdaq 100 technology news site] during the 2002 bubble [when many .coms dot-coms crashed].... It was a crazy, tumultuous time. But I told everybody, our primary principles are No. 1, we care about our users [clients], our advertisers and Wall Street in that order. There are people who reverse that order and they might make immediate money, but they build nothing with longevity. I recently sold CNET for $1.8 billion to CBS.

Minor stepped down as CNET's CEO in 2000, not 2002. And it strains credulity for him to claim he had anything to do with CBS's purchase of the site. it's quite possible Sotheby's misled Minor, as he claims, in selling him the paintings he bid on. But whoppers like these make me less inclined to believe the missives that issue forth from Minor's keyboard. Minor, a genuinely talented entrepreneur who spotted the potential of the Web long before others, deserves plenty of credit for creating CNET in the 1990s; why does he feel the need to inflate what he's accomplished since leaving it?