Yesterday afternoon, I noticed a few tweets regarding Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Sarah, a tech reporter for BusinessWeek, was universally panned — not necessarily for the content of the questions she asked, or for the answers she was able to squeeze out of the notoriously hard-to-read Zuckerberg. (As she notes from her Twitter account: in my book, getting mark to publicly admit to the yahoo deal, address beacon, and give news on changes in the platform and france equals successful interview.)

From where I sit, there seem to be two critique threads emerging:

1. She didn’t involve the crowd enough. In an audience teeming with bloggers hungry to ask their own questions, she held off opening the floor for a Q&A until the final ten minutes, an inarguably bad move.

2. Her interview style was more flirtatious than journalistic. This is the meme I find more troubling. Apparently instead of going for Zuckerberg’s jugular, she engaged him in a two-way conversation, often cutting him off to make a point. In the words of this commenter on the CNET post recapping the debacle, Sarah opted to play the “let me pretend to be your girlfriend” trick. She killed the substance of her questions by picking the wrong approach to posing them.

The commenter goes on to raise the larger question the tech establishment should be asking itself:

This points to love/hate relationship that geeks have with the women who try to invade their territory. Treat them with respect and genuinely act as one of them, and you get treated like Veronica Belmont or Cali Lewis. Fail to do this, and you get treated like Sarah Lacy.

There’s a whole category on Valleywag devoted to Valley Foxes — of whom Smoking Sarah Lacy is one. It’s easy to see that Sarah Lacy’s reputation as a “flirtational” reporter preceded her. Was this SXSWi keynote a disaster waiting to happen? Why did it catch anyone by surprise? And, if she really did get the goods from Zuckerberg, does it really matter how she did it?

I’ll leave the sexist subtext for another blogger to tease out of this story. (Exhibit A: Dig a Tech Girl). In the meantime, I await Sarah Lacy’s official, non-Twittered response.

Updated: Looks like Sarah’s BusinessWeek cohorts have her back: Facebook CEO Admits Missteps totally sidesteps the controversy. The lines separating journalism and PR just got a little blurrier…

Updated again: The video emerges. I haven’t watched it and probably won’t get to until much later in the day. I wonder if what I see will totally undermine this blog post.

I stumbled upon the new Industry Standard website recently and had the same reaction as O’Reilly Radar’s Jimmy Gutterman:

The new site is, to these eyes, an unintentional parody of Web 2.0 features. Rather than mere advertising, it has a more high-end sponsorship model (i.e., one pay-for-it-all advertiser), it seeks to create a community (you have to sign in to enjoy the more interesting features), it combines aggregation and a sliver of original material with a “wisdom of crowds” prediction market, and it appears to have a bare-bone staff. And, of course, to keep costs really low, this time the brand is online-only.

You have to admit that the new logo does bear an eerie resemblance to the ones included in this faux Web 2.0 logo round-up (originally from a thread on Yay Hooray). I mean…”beta?” Come on, guys.

MSDS: I hope this post makes up for my accidental casting of Web 2.0 design in a positive light during our meeting last week.

The paper’s Technology home page is usually where I start my day at the office. From there, I usually get hooked into a Blogrunner headline or head into the Bits blog.

Today, Saul Hansell posted two really thought-provoking posts on the merger in Bits: An Offer Yahoo Can’t Refuse, and the follow-up, Microsoft is Building a Spaceship out of Spare parts. The latter features one of the best geeky similes I’ve read in a long time:

For Microsoft, trying to build a new Internet portal-search engine-advertising network-cloud computing company will be trying to make a new interplanetary spaceship out of an old Soyuz capsule and Skylab while hurtling through the cosmos. The parts are temperamental; the systems are delicate; and the risk of catastrophic failure is ever-present.

Another New York Times blog, Dealbook, describes How Microsoft Could Go Hostile. They also have a good rundown of previous high-profile tech acquisitions in The Biggest Tech Deal Ever, Sort Of.

I’m really interested to see how this shakes out — and, more importantly, how that benefits (or hurts) both marketers and Microsoft/Yahoo end users. Bits and Dealbook are resources I’ll continue to refer to as the story progresses.

In this fresh and engaging interview, Weber openly shares his views on numerous topics, including: the guiding pillars of successful journalism (keep content fresh, useful, concise and surprising), how print publications stay relevant (take a great deal of information, boil it down and present it in a way that is easily accessible) and the different channels ideas go through at BusinessWeek before they become an assignment (ideas flow top down as well as bottom up at the publication). At 30+ minutes, the podcast is a little long but, all in all, a great listen!