Gizmodo posted last Thursday that the iPhone would be announced Monday. The entirety of their post:
I guarantee it. It isn't what I expected at all. And I've already said too much. -Brian Lam
This stirred up the blogosphere a decent amount. I thought it was potentially plausible; I knew Apple had to get past the FCC screening documents, which are public, so I always figured they'd be announcing the Apple phone first and then releasing it a few months down the line. The fact that this would be annouced without a Stevenote was really dubious; I don't think that such a highly anticipated product would be greeted by a mere press release. But like the rest of the internet, I figured why not wait until Monday and see what happened.
What happened was that Cisco launched a lackluster Skype phone. In other words, no one could care less.
Why Gizmodo would go out on a limb and do this floors me, to say the least. Gizmodo isn't a small-timer player- they've been around and have some weight to their existance. A ploy like this would be expected from someone wanting the quick traffic boost to their new blog. Why they let this Lam character post this is fairly insane. Yes, it was technically correct (the new Cisco phone is called iPhone), but they honestly couldn't believe anyone would give a crap about that. It's immediately obvious to anyone in the industry that that type of post coming from someone like Gizmodo would insinuate a real announcement from Apple about their new phone.
If they truly want to regain any sort of trust with their readers again, they'd can Brian Lam and reevaluate their policies at Gizmodo. There's already a backlash starting to form in the comments of their own blog, on many other blogs, digg, and other sites.
Edit: SMS Text News brought up the fact that Gizmodo had the initial post tagged with "Apple", so it's now clear they were deliberately taking advantage of their readership.