The big story from SXSW Interactive this year is the keynote session, which was an interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy. The reporter became the news. The ballroom was packed, and I watched on a big screen in a separate room. As I listened to the interview, it seemed that the questions were a little bit odd, and they weren’t really getting to the types of issues that I think the attendees wanted to hear about. It wasn’t long before the Twitter stream turned really negative. Turns out she is writing a book on Facebook that is coming out soon. She also seemed to announce (to Mark’s surprise) that Facebook was launching in France on that day.

Having the attention on Sarah probably saved Zuckerberg some negative attention himself. He answered questions while looking at the audience, instead of his interviewer. As he looked into the audience, his eyes were darting back and forth in a strange type of nervousness. But he probably performed a lot better than any other 23 year old that you might find, who suddenly as at the helm of a company worth $15B.

Rather than pile on, we thought that we’d just point you to the most interesting links on the subject. I met her at a private event after the interview, and she was very nice and open to talking about what happened. Omar Gallaga from Austin360.com interviewed her just before I spoke with her, and she explained herself a little bit in this video. [Omar, your video is flying all over the net!]

• Crunchgear hates on her pretty bad, with a minute-by-minute account.
• Local Austin blogger Thom Singer weighs in.
• You can see all of Valleywag’s posts on SXSW (many of them on this topic).

Folks in the Twitter stream like Michael Arrington and Robert Scobel were commenting on the idea that high profile people may decline coming to SXSW in the future for this interview format. Leave us your thoughts in the comments section.