A great interview... FAIL

So, was lurking at my "awesome" Twitter feed and saw a tweet by JohnMu (http://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/14165538484). He points to an interview created by Lee Odden on TopRankBlog.com. The subject is  Maile Ohye, one of my favorite Googlers to date (she's points out great things and she's even funny); the problem is not with Maile, she did a great job answering the questions, the problem is with the questions.

When you do an interview, please, for the humanity's sake, don't do it with template questions. The interviewer had a bunch of unrelated questions created in the office, written on a paper and he asked these template questions. This is bad. It's unnatural.

A good interview should be a dialog between the interviewer and the subject of the interview. A chat. You may have some questions written on the paper, but you should just flow with the subject and use your pre-made questions if the chat hits a wall.

For example, Lee asks:

Google Webmaster Central has been a great resource for many webmasters. What tips can you share with web site owners to make the most out of Google Webmaster Tools?

Maile answers:

Awww, Webmaster Central a “great resource” for many webmasters? That’s wonderful to hear. As for tips, I’d say verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools, sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools’ Message Center, and then check out all the specific data for your site: our Top Search Queries feature was just revamped. Crawl Errors is cool for making sure your site is accessed as you’d expect (many people find unknown 404s, or realize they have server downtime because of noticing the “Unreachable” errors), HTML Suggestions shows you the URLs with duplicate titles or meta descriptions. I think once you start poking around in Webmaster Tools you’ll learn more and more. It’s addictive.

then Lee asks a totally unrelated question from Maile:

How does one become a Bionic Poster?

Come on, would you ask that considering Maile's answer to the previous question if you'd chat with her next to a coffee in Starbucks? You certainly wouldn't. You would ask something like "What if the webmaster hits the wall, if he needs help?", and she'd reply that there's a very helpful forum where they can ask for help and the bionics would likely help the webmaster. Then you can ask about how does one become a bionic.

Just saying...