Mr Miyagi puts it rather squarely

Blog­gers are self-serving, unless of course there’s a greater com­mu­nity need where it will serve the blog­ger him­self to actu­ally help out, I don’t think blog­gers will go out of their way unless they have a real altru­is­tic nature about them lah.

Yes, I said that to Jermyn Chow, the Straits Times Inter­ac­tive reporter who had to file his story pod­cast. And what about that term again — the ‘glass houses’ one? Thank you, Alex Au, for the gift that keeps on giving.

mrbrown and I were inter­viewed on the phone this after­noon for the follow-up sto­ries on the stolen hand­phone sex video clip saga. Why, you may well ask? Espe­cially since nei­ther of us has ever stolen a phone or made a sex video clip (no, honest)?

Well, the story angle (and there always has to be one with these tree-based media type pub­li­ca­tions) links the saga to the what reporter Jermyn Chow calls ‘the power of blog­ging’. Well, since mrbrown’s and my blogs are (ahem) quite ‘power’, I sup­posed that’s what makes us the voices of author­ity on mat­ters like this. The same applies to when they do sto­ries on elec­toral laws and any other thing you could poke a stick at and say ‘hey, I think global warming’s caused by blogs, I bet­ter call mrbrown and Mr Miyagi and ask them what they think’.

‘And what about the war in Iraq? Damn those bloggers!’

But apart from that, Jermyn and I had a good chat about the whole thing, and he expressed his frus­tra­tion in try­ing to get hold of the source of the story.

Well, is lid­dat one lah, hor? But I did assure him that blogs and blog­gers were not ‘out to get main­stream media’, and that he’d still keep his job, except for if he takes a blogger’s word for the truth and pub­lishes some­thing he takes to be fact with­out actu­ally cor­rob­o­rat­ing it.

It could hap­pen. There’s no law against lying to a reporter. You just have to sift out the bad from the cred­i­ble ones, dude.

Pod­cast: STI: Spin-offs from home-made sex video?

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