It's probably a bit late in life for me to learn this lesson, but it turns out that sometimes a reporter will take what you say and warp it to fit some particular storyline or agenda. Here's what I'm talking about.

A few weeks ago, I spent several minutes talking with a reporter working on a BusinessWeek.com story on John Edwards' use of new technologies. This was just a few days after Edwards had "pre-announced" his candidacy announcement in a web video circulated via email and YouTube. Shot in the backyard of a home in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, the video showed Edwards dressed in a casual button-down and not afraid to mutter an "uhh" here and there. This was back before Obama or Clinton had announced their intentions, and I told this reporter that in the nascent field of candidates, Edwards indeed seemed to have the best feel for how to work in this new medium of short-form web video. What's more, I said, after a couple somewhat stilted clips, he seemed to have learned to use his performance skills to good effect.

In the course of that conversation, we drifted into talking about what Mark Warner had wanted to do with new technologies, had he gone through with a presidential run. I said that part of the Warner approach to new media was the thinking that, even if Warner didn't turn out to be the most charismatic candidate in the Democratic field in terms of podcasting or video blogging or the like, he had a remarkable ability to talk substance in a way we thought would be compelling. And in fact, I told this reporter, I saw that one of Warner's particular strengths was that his background as a high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist set him up to be extremely strong on the issues at the heart of this new and sometimes confusing communications landscape -- net neutrality, media reform, wireless spectrum reform, and the like.

At then at some point, and I think it was during some casual chit-chat, for whatever reason I mentioned a week I spent volunteering on behalf of Howard Dean's campaign during the 2004 Iowa caucuses. Yep, I was an orange-hatted "Perfect Stormer," knocking on doors like hundreds of other folks who took a week from their lives to support Dean.

I see now that all this may have been a bit dense and nuanced. But I was trying to help this reporter develop a more-informed focus and better context for his story on a topic I have a good deal of interest in. Yet all that became this:

Some strategists say Edwards is simply more at ease with new technology than other heavyweights. "He gets it in a way no other candidate has yet," says Nancy Scola, a former Howard Dean campaign aide.

She contrasts Edwards' approach to that of former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, who also employed video blogging and other online tools as he weighed a bid last year. But Warner came off as stiff and uncomfortable online, says Scola, who organized his much-hyped press conference in online virtual world Second Life.

Sigh. I might not be the brightest light in the shed, but would I really say that about a guy that I dropped my new life in New York just to try to get elected? A guy I commuted hundreds of miles each week between Brooklyn and Virginia for half a year to work for? Here's Mark Warner's video on net neutrality that I sent to anyone who would watch and posted wherever half-appropriate. Here's his speech on "Why I'm a Democrat" that I was actively working to have added to the homepage of his website just before he decided not to run. That's the guy that I supposedly derided as "stiff and uncomfortable." Again, sigh. I should have taken a lesson from Mark Cuban and expected this, I guess.