It's a bit strange to read, from a distance, the feedback and criticism of BusinessWeek blogger Sarah Lacy's interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckberberg, which many observers and audience members felt went terribly wrong.

Jeff Jarvis says Lacy's biggest mistakes were "not knowing her audience" and not asking them what questions they wanted Zuckerberg to answer, and I'd agree those were two key take aways from viewing the video and reading the posts around the blogosphere.

However, I think there's another point here that's worth making--in this day and age of real time interactivity, unconferences and bar camps, everyone in the audience wants to be the interviewer--and, in a way, they should be. One could argue that Sarah Lacy's mistake was in not realizing she was just the vessel to channel the crowd--that she didn't engage enough in participatory media--and that failure made her irrelevant to the audience, who then leapt on her cruelly as she became non-relevant to their agenda.

Somehow, it's hard not to contrast this event and the failure of the talking heads format--with Robert Scoble's coverage of the release of the iPhone at the Palo Alto Apple story last summer--Robert went down to the store with his son, got in line, and spent 24 hours covering the release of the new iPhone as the first in line and man in the street--getting HUGE media coverage for both himself and the new device.

In other words, that third wall between geeks and their heros is gone; fair warning to anyone who gets in the way of direct access--the crowd will get'ya, real time.

Footnote: Sarah's post event comments:


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