As some of you know I write a column for Business 2 magazine in which I interview CEOs of interesting companies. I've been doing this a while now, and it's great fun, and an nice excuse to pick smart folks brains. In April I thought it might be fun to interview Mike Homer, the CEO of Kontiki, as he not only had a new product coming out, but also had seen the ups and downs of Web 1.0 over at AOL and Netscape. In any case, I did the interview, edited it, sent it to the magazine, and promptly forgot all about it, moving on to Bob Wright at NBC and then Omid Kordestani at Google.

But a month or so later I was wrapping up funding for Federated Media, and a friend of Mike's mentioned that Mike was an active angel and might be interested. I shot him an email and, at the last minute, he decided to invest - a very small amount, but nevertheless, an investment.

Now, Mike's investment was not directly connected to the column which ran in Business 2.0, coming after it was edited and sent to the magazine, but thanks to the lag time in publication of a monthly magazine, it sure looks bad. I should have realized this, but I didn't, at least not until it was too late for the magazine to note the apparent conflict in the column.

This was a stupid mistake on my part, and I am sorry about it. The magazine is running a clarification in this month's issue, which reads:

In the Titans of Tech column in our June issue ("Reinventing Television"), we ran an interview with Mike Homer, CEO of Kontiki, conducted by contributing writer John Battelle. After the issue was sent to press, Battelle announced a small round of funding for his new business venture, FM Publishing, in which Homer is a minority investor. According to Battelle, Homer's involvement in FM took place well after the interview and editing of the column were done.

As I said when I first posted here: "I intend to be as transparent as I can afford to be about the company and its intentions over the next few months as I struggle to get it up and running. In other words, if you are going to make mistakes, may as well make them in public - they get corrected faster that way."

Mike is an investor in FM, and I'm glad he is, but I should have mentioned this in my column. Mea culpa.