It’s been a while, but SXSW finally got my 2008 panel titled Blogs, Buzz, and Buddy Lists posted online.

Here’s the description:

Blogs, Buzz, and Buddy Lists

SXSW Interactive PodcastsUse the Internet before the Internet uses you. Thanks to blogs, web-video, and social networking sites, the online universe is a valuable (but no less intimidating) landscape for artists. How do you get the best out of blogs and other sites, to maximize your potential for an audience. Or, how do you get yourself introduced to the booming industry of online journalism and video sharing? These experts dig deep into these ever-changing trends.

Paul Harrill Lovell Films

Karina Longworth Film Blogger, Spout.com

Alison Willmore IFC

Ian Schafer CEO, Deep Focus

Victor Pineiro Writer/Producer, Second Skin

Listen to the panel here! It was most definitely a good one.

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While at SXSW, I did a podcast interview with one of my favorite Scotsmen, Ewan Spence. I talk about the state of online marketing, the (in)famous Zuckerberg interview, and some other potpourri.

Check it out here.

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In case you missed it, BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy pretty much bombed the Mark Zuckerberg keynote interview yesterday at SXSW. Check out CNet’s coverage here.

One thing I noticed was that before she went on, she sent a post over to Silicon Alley Insider telling us what she was going to ask Zuckerberg.

So, we will not re-hash why Zuckerberg didn’t sell to yahoo. We will not re-hash the fact that he’s — gasp! — 23. I might make fun at his awkward 60 Minutes line: “was that a question?”

Everyone has glommed onto the corporate facebook story. And to Mark, that’s the least interesting part. So we’ll spend some time talking about the site itself, and the role it’s playing in the world. And we’ll tackle thorny advertising questions. (Beacon, anyone?)

Mostly, I hope to draw out some of the real Mark. I’ve spent some 30 hours or so interviewing him, starting when he was a 19 year-old punk. And you know, he’s not a bad guy.

THAT’S the problem.

She told us what she was going to ask him. Lacy should have done a little more research into the makeup of the crowd at SXSW. She should have known that this crowd wanted answers. If Zuckerberg wasn’t going to provide answers, or at the very least, information, then that would’ve been his (or Facebook’s) problem. Instead, she utilized her ‘familiarity’ with Zuckerberg (she’s interviewed him before, and is writing a book that features him) to try and ‘friend’ (approriately enough) information out of him. And that information never came. Zuckerberg is not known for his conversational finesse. You need to put him on the spot - without insulting him. If the questions were the right ones, the ones that the audiences wanted to hear, she could have at least satisfied some of the crowd.

But that never happened.

She never asked us about what we wanted to hear from him. Of course there is time for ‘audience questions’ after the interview. But why wait until then to hear what we have to say?

What Sarah Lacy should have done was write a blog post and solicit questions to ask Zuckerberg in the comments section. She could have taken the pulse of the crowd before she arrived. She could have at least given Zuckerberg the opportunity to address the issues that were so important to the crowd.

Style aside, a lot of what was missing was substance. In an interview, the questions need to have as much as (if not more) substance than the answers. It puts the onus on the interviewee. If Sarah gave the audience the opportunity to contribute substance to the interview — relevant to them — than maybe the crowd wouldn’t have turned on her so quickly.

Isn’t it ironic that one of the most attended, most accessible (to the public) interviews of the CEO of the most popular social and collaborative property on the web, had nothing social or collaborative about it?

Next time, please ask. Don’t tell.

Oh…and please use this as an opportunity to listen to the crowd that is your audience. And converse. Don’t antagonize.

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Last year at SXSW, Twitter burst onto the scene in a big way, eventually paving its way to becoming a major force in the messaging/microblogging space. Twitter’s ability to allow attendees to keep tabs on each other was a welcome addition to the festival, as there are so many parties, so close to each other, that it became easy to know where all your friends (or stalkees) were at. It was also helpful in telling you which parties to avoid because of long lines or closed bar tabs.

Lots of folks came down to this year’s SXSW Interactive conference to anoint this year’s breakthrough property or technology.

I’m casting my vote for Kyte. But while it’s sponsorship of the flat-panel displays here at SXSW (as Twitter did last year) is helping it gain visibility during the interactive conference, it may actually be during the music festival later in the week where it truly shines.

You see, Kyte makes it as easy as possible to capture video with a mobile phone (any mobile phone with the capability) and post it to your own channel on the site. It’s got one of the easiest interfaces and processes I’ve seen. One of the latest innovations by the company though (launching today, according to VentureBeat), may eventually be what makes it a key player in the space — the broadcasting of live video from a phone. Qik does this, but you’re limited presently to Nokia phones. The samples of Kyte’s usage playing on the flat-panel displays here show people streaming footage of bands performing live at parties, interviews with attendees, and green room antics. If Kyte, in fact, works with multiple handsets, we’ve got a winner on our hands here, folks.

Add to all this their apparently rosy relationship with some big media companies and a new round of funding (over $23 million to date), and we’ve got one to watch.

Keep an eye on Kyte. Here’s my first video, created, uploaded, and produced in 5 minutes:

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If you don’t know who Henry Jenkins (author of Convergence Culture) is, you should. Get to know him here. Steven Johnson is the author of Everything Bad is Good For You. A great read.

From the Henry Jenkins/Steven Johnson SXSW Keynote, a summary (Questions by Johnson, Answers by Jenkins):

Q: Will there be a backlash towards youth’s inolvement with technology?

A: We are probably overdue for one. Young people are adopters. They are engaged with it. Parents fear it. Moral panic sets in when you stop asking questions.

Q: Are there any provocative findings about whether or not learning is suffering as a result of technology, video games, etc.?

A: We need to know a lot about a lot, but need access to group-edited information like wikipedia. No one person should be allowed to write an encyclopedia entry. The kids in a classroom need to work together. They need to collaborate. Until we’re able to develop tests about how we process knowledge and collaborate vs. regurgitating information, we won’t be able to advance learning measurement. We need different models than standardized tests.

Q: Do you ever look at a piece of technology and say ‘that’s stupid’?

A: As a knee-jerk reaction sometimes. But people don’t normally do, or create, meaningless things. New technology, when it catches on, is engaging. And we need to understand what it means to the people it means a lot to. People do things for a reason. We just don’t all understand them.

Q: Which is better. Lost or The Wire?

A: TV is many different things. The Wire may be the best show inside the box. Lost may be the best one outside the box. Much of the Lost experience happens online. It makes it deeper. The Wire may be the last gasp of old television (Hill Street Blues on steroids). Lost is probably the future of television. One with an in-depth online experience.

Q: Why do people spend so much time with this stuff?

A: What’s wrong with America, in that they are not given enough creativity to apply in their workplace? Why is creative energy so underutilized? Their jobs represent only a small subsection for applications of their creativity. They need these outlets. How do we turn all that creativity into something that solves the problems of society?

Q: Fan Fiction. Talk about it. And We Are Wizards the documentary about Harry Potter fan fiction.

A: This is a generation that learned how to write because of Harry Potter. How to social network. How to play music. How to be political. How to organize. How to become a transformative force. It’s representative of things we do in play, that will eventually allow us to change the world.

Q: When people talk about this generation as being the dumbest generation. Do we have a crisis, or do we have an incredible opportunity? How does it apply to politics — especially Obama?

A: Jenkins loves Obama. And the phrase ‘Yes we can’. Young people online say ‘we’. Adults say ‘I’. Young people say, ‘what can we do together’. Collective intelligence (the recurring theme here, btw) is what creates this phenomenon. Obama is a community organizer. Clinton is a litigator. Obama’s platform is like a stub on wikipedia — it’s one we are going to flesh out together. He’s built a movement — not just a campaign. He’s brought a generation of young people together. To social networks it’s not just a campaign for a candidate, it’s providing shared ownership of the campaign.

Q: What about civic media?

A: MIT created the Center for Future Civic Media which seeks to figure out how to enable civic engagement. There’s a civic connection taking place through games (as Putnam states in Bowling Alone). The idea is to explore what a culture of democracy looks like. How does it become a lifestyle that connects us to each other as part of the same community? The social connections we invest deepest in are online connections. How do we learn from that to make it easier to connect with each other?

News Item: Steven Johnson’s outside.in will be launching On My Radar which is like the Facebook News Feed for geographically relevant information, i.e. what’s going on not in my network, but in my area? In the few square blocks/miles around me?

Jenkins hopes that we can continue to give young people the tools to express their ideas about themselves and their communities.

Questions from the audience ensued, with attention being paid towards letting children be creative and have a voice, while also guiding their safety.

Also, collective intelligence was also challenged, with Jenkins explaining that diversity is needed to come to an acceptable consensus. There’s no mechanism in YouTube to support diversity, so majority (i.e. white middle-class males) rules unlike with Wikipedia. It’s not the hive mind we’re talking about. It’s about a democratic society processing information and coming to a consensus.

Jenkins explained that the Internet is what enables us to maintain social connections in spite of the mobility of our society, that began in the 1950s and 1960s (as Toffler and Putnam argued).

In response to what we can do to hold companies accountable for their challenging of intellectual property issues, Jenkins stated that we can’t just think that participatory culture is an eventuality ro something we’re entitled to. We need to fight for it. It needs to be a platform to critique these kinds of companies.

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This was a panel hosted by Anastasia Goodstein of Ypulse about what teens are looking for when they go online and use their mobile phones. The panel consisted of real, human teenagers (and tweens).

Interesting insights from the panel (and remember, it’s a small focus group we’re dealing with here)…

* goodreads.com is one of their favorite sites (thank goodness teens are still reading books).

* MySpace & Facebook are still hot. They communicate with siblings — NOT parents. MySpace has some catching up to do with ‘open apps’. Hi-5 came up as well. They help meet them meet people from their school that they may not already know. One of the girls on the panel was 12, but she said she was 16 on MySpace. One of the guys was 99 years old. More of them have MySpace accounts than Facebook accounts.

* Digg keeps them updated. Interestingly enough, they consider it a NEWS site to help keep them up with news of the day. That makes me nervous, personally.

* Sites like Purevolume and Mixtape websites helped them discover new and old music. Music is a huge part of their lives.

* EvERY guy on the panel is a gamer.

* Seventeen.com isn’t deep enough for one of the girls on the panel.

* Runescape, a MMORPG, was also discussed.

* They hate the experience interrupting ads. Especially pop-ups/unders and pre-roll and mid-roll. One of them goes to NBA.com to watch videos, but all he sees are Miller Beer ads (that’s not good).

* But they do accept that advertisements are necessary. They just don’t want it slowing down their computers, interrupting their experience, or slowing down the load of the page.

* They are starting to trim their MySpace friend lists. They are also concerned about MySpace’s new changes — or any changes. They think that MySpace thinks they are more important to their lives than it really is.

* They use email to register for sites and for school assignments. But barely ever for social communication.

* One of the girls eloquently stated that it necessary for teens to understand how to ‘type’ — not just use LOL, TTYL, or any other txt-speak.

* They barely ever use IM anymore. This was almost universally agreed upon.

* Texting on mobile phones is very important. Many have unlimited texting plans. They don’t have internet plans — way too expensive. They do play casual games on the phones. If they have a camera phone, they use it a lot.

* None of them watch videos on their phones.

* They couldn’t live without their phones.

* They don’t really like virtual worlds — high schoolers say they don’t have time for it. One used to use Zwinky (man, this site is getting trashed by the girls on this panel), but don’t like it anymore — she didn’t like when people asked for personal information. They guys are turned off a bit by the pay-to-play MMORPGs. One girl mentioned they play around with their Yahoo! Avatar. One of the girls was speaking about the time she used to spend on TheN.com (the cable network) in message boards and chat rooms around their shows, like DeGrassi.

* Only one member of the panel made a video that was entered into an advertiser-supported contest. But many do not have the hardware. But they do like the concept. They like having a voice. They like brands ‘respecting’ their opinions.

* Humor or alternate (not-dry) angles really grab their attention.

* NO ONE goes to the regular news sites (CNN.com, NY Times.com, etc.)

* Social causes are really important to these kids. Especially ones that they can take actions to help with. Easy and fun things to do to help are best. Online efforts really do get them to pay attention. One example used was FreeRice.com.

* They do watch online video. Even from other cultures. Especially Japanese (i.e. crunchyroll.com). Veoh was brought up quite often. Yes. More often than YouTube, even.

* When they like a show on TV, they interact with all of its online elements. They miss their shows a lot, and catch them online when they can. They all love CSI. That’s a surprise.

* They want ads on their sites to be contextually relevant.

* Ad agency reps are getting up here and asking these kids if they visit brand microsites or click on ads. Shouldn’t they know this before they go out and spend their clients’ money trying to reach them?

* They love flash games like the ones found at AddictingGames.com and NewGrounds and AlbinoBlackSheep.

* There are teens in the audience asking questions about the teens’ behavior on the panel (like, ‘How do you make social plans more often? Online or in person/phone?’). It’s so ‘meta’. BTW, the answer is that they probably will use the phone. It’s more time sensitive. And a better way to maintain a friendship. By the way, that dynamic is what I love about this conference. It’s not just agency folks and marketers and publishers. It’s real people interested in this stuff.

Great panel, Anastasia.

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