Techcrunch: James Whatley is the Queen Mother?

“She was the peoples princess and thats how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.”

I have, rather cleverly, taken a leaf out of Mr Blair’s gifted, moving speech on the death of Princess Diana (in case you didn’t recognise the modified text, full speech here).

But fear not dear reader.

James Whatley is not dead. He’s alive, kicking and sending photos to Flickr every moment of the day.

He’s just one special guy at the centre of a burning Twittercraze. Special enough, it seems, to have his own just-in-case template standing by at one of the world’s leading technology sites — the ubiquitous, the influential, the downright brilliant Techcrunch.

In this case we’re talking Techcrunch UK.

This weekend they were working on a story about James Whatley (ye of SpinVox — yes, James, if you’re reading, this is the 18th time I’ve written about SpinVox in the last week) regarding his future.

A slip-of-the-hand and woosh, the story, not ready for publication, was shooting across the wires.

Mike Butcher, top chap at Techcrunch UK, sorted out the error right-away and posted this apology. He knocked it on the head right-away, but a run-away bug put the story straight into the RSS readers of many Mobile Industry Review readers. As many as 5 of whom have emailed me with the story within about 20 minutes. You guys are fast.

‘Tis the practice, of course, of many a national and international media outlet to keep draft copies of obituaries of the rich, the famous and the royal, so that, when the news breaks, they’re ready-and-waiting to simply fill in the blanks. It seems Techcrunch UK were, sensibly, preparing (or future-gazing) for what they deemed inevitable.

And you know what, it would have been one explosive, explosive story for the first Monday of a very sleepy August.

I trust that Mike and the team at Techcrunch UK have got their Ewan MacLeod Quits Mobile Industry Review After Surprise $800m Lottery Win; Buys Motorola, Promptly Discontinues All RAZR Production template ready and awaiting. It’s gotta be any day now…