Friday, October 08, 2004

More and more, blogs are giving sources the power to strike back and making journalists think twice about what they run in a story and how they conduct an interview. Case in point: Billionaire technology entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who also owns the NBA's Dallas Mavericks basketball team, launched a blog last spring and quickly posted an e-mail exchange he had with Dallas Morning News sports columnist Kevin Blackistone.

So should every high-profile technology exec and TV personality have a blog? That remains to be seen. Spinmeisters would worry that the wrong thing could come out without their scrutiny, but Cuban seems to flaunt those conventions, responding directly to my query for an interview within hours instead of days. And as you can tell in the Q&A below, he rarely holds back.

Cuban: "A blog is only valuable if you can be brutally honest. I think that's why tech execs have probably been the leaders so far. It's pretty safe to talk in-depth on technologies."