Q&A With 12-year-old Blogger Behind “Good Morning Geek,” Max Swisher, Part II

Technorati lists over 24,000 tech blogs.

I think I’m on safe ground in saying that only a few were started by 10-year-olds.

Now at the seasoned age of 12, Max Swisher sat down with me at Great Bear Coffee in Los Gatos for an on-the-record discussion of his blog, “Good Morning Geek.”

I published the first half of an interview with Max on Tuesday.

Here’s the second half of the conversation:

Q: I got a kick out of your Windows jab when you attended the Dolby event.

The event was fun, as we crowded into the theatre and watched the video without the left and right channels (they had a server error, welcome to a PC dependent company.)                              
                              Dolby Ok, go event
                              “Good Morning Geek,” December 10, 2010

Do you feel an obligation to only say positive things if someone invites you to an event or gives you a product to review?

A: Not at all. You can’t hide stuff. That wouldn’t be honest.

Q: I know you spent time with HP’s CTO Phil McKinney. What did you take away from this meeting?

A: That it’s tough to get your ideas used in a huge company like HP.

Q: So you’re probably more suited for a startup?

A: Yes. Right now I have an internship with Cooliris. It’s a fun place to work.

Q: How’s your seventh-grade English class?

A: I get OK grades. Here’s the thing: I hate structured writing. In English class, everything has to fit into a box. That’s what I like about blogging. There is no box.

Q: Does your English teacher read your blog?

A: My teachers aren’t interested in the blog. But they do come to me for technical help with the school’s computers.

Side note: For a second I thought he was going to say “but they did stay at a Holiday Inn.”

Q: Does your middle school offer any classes in computing?

A: There is one class called “tech,” but it only teaches applications. They don’t teach anything about the actual computer. I talked to a kid who took the class and he didn’t even know what RAM is.

Q: Your YouTube video on the iPhone antennae fiasco generated over 40,000 views and counting. Tell me how this came about.

A: I put the video and post out the same day that Apple held a press conference on the iPhone antennae. It was cool … every time I hit refresh there were more views. I had a few hundred views over the next couple days and then it became 1,000 and just kept growing.

Q: So you made a conscious effort to leverage a high-profile event?

A: Not exactly. I was just curious. If Apple was having this problem with the iPhone, does the same problem exist with other phones? So I took my Droid to see if it had the same problem and it did. It turns out the people making fun of Apple were wrong. Of course, the Droid now has a new baseline version so it doesn’t have this problem anymore.

Q: Keep seizing the mouse.

A: Thanks.