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How do you justify producing content (in this case, PodTech) featuring your own employees (corporate video producer and blogger, Robert Scoble, and Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist) spouting basic platitudes devoid of knowledge? Splice them together with video of Marissa Mayer, the eminently respectable, famous, and truly significant Google VP!

Scoble, "famous" blogger in his own right, bills the video thusly:

Tina Magnergard Bjers is on loan to PodTech this summer (she's a Swedish journalist who is here to learn more about the tech industry and new media from the inside) and asked, in a video, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer, me, and PodTech's Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang this question: how will Web 2.0 Change Journalism?

You might think it's a group interview or conversation, but you'd be wrong. The Mayer quotes, the most well-reasoned and measured of the statements, appear culled from a few seconds of a post-speech interview. The rest of the thankfully brief PodTech video are the PodTech employees rehashing the most banal of Web 2.0 mantras (Scoble: "It'll be faster and more interactive", Owyang: "It'll morph into many different shapes... it'll be amorphous") or worse (Scoble reciting the number of feeds he reads for the 622nd time) in answer to the question.

There's nothing wrong in asking the question "How will Web 2.0 change journalism" nor in producing a mix of the answers, but if you want to avoid the taint of self-promotion and self-aggrandizing, make sure you interview more than one non-employee, better yet — that they outnumber employees... or at least that your employees have something worth saying.