Here's one reason why in-person Q&A can be more fun than an email interview, and more dangerous. (Warning: blog media arcanery coming up). Tech publisher Tony Perkins, after a panel at the Adtech conference in San Francisco, was asked about the recent refusal by two blog mavens to give interviews on the phone to Wired Magazine. Jason Calacanis, who sold a blog stable to AOL, and Dave Winer, who pioneered the new publishing format, said they'd been misquoted by mainstream journalists in the past, and would only answer questions on email, or on their blogs. Perkins, a Valley veteran who ran the Red Herring when Calacanis founded its East Coast equivalent, was much less cautious when giving his opinion, yesterday, on the blog mavens' fashionable new press policy: it was "chickenshit", he told one Adtech questioner, and Calacanis and Winer were "control freaks". And that's why smart people avoid speaking off-the-cuff.