This is just a glimpse of the patchwork of business cards that I collected during the SXSW Interactive festival. Of course, the festival isn’t about biz cards - it’s about new friends, valuable connections and absorbed insight that will last for years.

After Sunday’s trainwreck/debacle/revolt at the Mark Zuckerberg SXSW keynote, the Facebook founder decided to engage in a “redo” conversation today at Pangaea during a Facebook developer meetup. I learned about this spur-of-the-moment event via Robert Scoble’s Twitter feed and instantly rushed to Pangaea in a cab.

Below is a short video I captured of Zuckerberg taking the stage. Today’s conversation was good for him, especially in light of yesterday’s bizarre keynote interview. He took open Q&A from the crowd and seemed to be more comfortable, in his element, and confident in what he was saying.

(Image by Brian Solis on Flickr)

Today during the Mark Zuckerberg keynote at SXSW, a compelling thing happened. Zuckerberg was interviewed by author Sarah Lacy, who scored zero popularity points with the crowd. While she was frequently interjecting personal antecdotes, plugs for her soon-to-be-released book, twirling her hair and overall conducting a bad interview, all sorts of chatter and criticism was happening among audience members via various back channels such as Twitter.

The silently-brewing revolt finally came to a head when Lacy mentioned the infamous Lesley Stahl interview a second time in response to Zuckerberg answering only with one-word responses, and Zuckerberg finally put her in her place by saying: “You have to ask questions.” A jubilant, overjoyed cheer erupted from us - an audience of thousands of angry monkeys who were jilted out of a decent keynote conversation. Lacy later commented that the crowd couldn’t possibly understand how hard her job was, which resulted in more boisterous jeers. By the end of the interview, her frustration with the revolt was evident.

Lacy: “Could somebody send me a message and tell me how I sucked so badly?”
Audience member, into the mic: “Give me your e-mail address.”

This backlash is just a microcosm of what happens every day within disruptive social mediums, whether it’s a blogger calling out bad customer service at Dell, or a Taco Bell patron posting a video of rats running around the kitchen on YouTube.

The tools are at our disposal, so be prepared for disruption and know how to respond.

UPDATE / 6:44 pm: Jesse from BitStrips sent this comic to me, which I love. It adds a little more context to the whole fiasco so I thought I’d post it.

Unbelievable! Day one of SXSW was packed with fantastic conversations and invaluable new friends. The day started with bacon, biscuits and a social media chat with former colleague Greg Swan (new media guru and founder of Perfect Porridge), Jim Turner of One by One Media and Rick Calvert, co-founder of BlogWorld.

In the middle of sitting in on the “How to rawk SXSW” session, word started to spread via Twitter of an impromptu tweetup happening at Champions sports bar across the street. Greg and I immediately ran to join this, and met all sorts of Tweeps including the legendary @Pistachio, @simedia, @kristanaeher, @newmediajim, @twalk, @hansveld and @waderockett, among others. A quick, grainy video of the tweetup is below.

As if the day couldn’t get any better, Charlie the Unicorn stopped by for a beer before wandering off across the street. YES. We later met Brian Shaler of Crappy Graphs fame, the one-and-only Robert Scoble, and co-creator of Fantasy Congress (Andrew Lee) in the Hilton lobby bar.

Tomorrow I’m blasting off for Austin, Texas, for the 2008 South by Southwest interactive festival, a gathering of like-minded geeks, developers, designers, artists, entrepreneurs and gurus. I’ll be tweeting the entire time (assuming that Twitter doesn’t blow up from the massive increase in user activity). Looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new ones, frosty beverages and heavy doses of inspiration.

SXSW always sets the tone for my year. If you’ve never attended, I highly recommend you budget for it in 2009!

Last Saturday I moved into the new Lava Row office, which is at 400 E. Locust in Des Moines’ gentrified East Village neighborhood. It’s great to finally have a home for the business, especially after a year of working from my house and various coffee shops. Please stop in for a visit if you’re in the area — visitors are always welcome! I’m way up in the tower, as shown in the photo below.

After launching Des Moines’ first TweetUp back in February, my intent was for future events to be de-centralized and self-organizing. I opened up a wiki to let participants discuss ideas for future locations and dates, and almost overnight, others had taken the reins and organized a second TweetUp, which took place this Monday evening at Court Avenue Brewing Company. Based on our unofficial headcount, 17 people showed up — that’s almost triple attendance from last time!

What I love about these events is the opportunity to connect with other people interested in technology and new media here in Des Moines, who I otherwise may never have met. The insights, shared knowledge and ideas formed over cocktails with new friends are extremely valuable, or, as @webboy put it: “It did more for me in one night than LinkedIn did in one year.”

Well said. If you’re interested in joining us for future TweetUps, please check out / join the Des Moines TweetUp wiki and be sure to track updates using the #dmtweetup hashtag method on Twitter.