danliveshere.com

Two things stood out for me today…

1) Passion – I was on a panel today with Paul Colligan at Searchfest 2008, and he has passion for what he does. He has several podcasts and is a person neck deep in social media/web 2.0. If you ever get a chance to pick his brain about all things in the Web 2.0 space, do it. I will blog tomorrow about the presentation.

2) Over-reaction. Wow, there was a TON of buzz on Techmeme and blogs throughout the internet about the SWSX interview of Mark Zuckerberg (founder/CEO of Facebook) and internet reporter Sarah Lacy. People were just SLAMMING her on the blogs and in the audience at this session of SXSW. I’ve linked to the video from allfacebook.com. I guess after all the hype, I was disappointed as she didn’t do that bad of a job. She kept it casual and tried to have a conversation with Mark. She obviously has a past and tried to showcase some of those stories. Yes, she does a lot of self-promotion of her book, and no, she doesn’t get extremely technical… but by no means deserved the rousing she got. Someone in the audience heckled her for asking bad questions and then turned around and asked the most generic question in the world “What is the biggest obstacle to Facebook”. That’s like asking a band your interviewing, who their musical influences are. If you know who your subject is, you won’t find out anything new, therefor it is a question just to ask one.

She could’ve improved this interview if she would’ve had some specific direction on where she wanted to take it, rather than a fire-side chat with Mark. That I think would have shaped up better.

** UPDATE ** WordPress makes it way too hard to post video on your blog. Seriously, I wanted to embed the flash video from Viddler and it is taking too much time to hunt around for a plugin. I don’t freaking care that WP is “protecting” us. Thanks, I’ll start looking for another platform. In Blogger I could work on html in my posts. This is retarded, and no, it isn’t user error. I’ve been searching for 1/2 an hour and this looks like a common issue. Poop on WP today.

** UPDATE #2 ** Scoble has blogged about the Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg interview. Pretty solid post (as usual from Scoble). Great point by him… know your audience. She didn’t, and therefor went in directions that they didn’t like. Of course, unlike what these people are used to, they couldn’t just go to another site, they were “stuck” there in person. Also, after consideration, there is a way to handle heckelers and that was not the way. Either don’t acknowledge them, or have a solid comeback. She did neither. Having been in radio where most interviews are live, I’ve seen my fair share of really bad interviews, and this my friends, wasn’t THAT bad of an interview.