“SouthBy” is what us Austin natives call the madcap media festival of SxSW that takes over the city every March for about 2 weeks. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to rock out with Black Mountain at the Scoot Inn during the music part of the festival/conference, as I’ll just be staying for the Interactive part, but I got to see them at the Rock n Roll Hotel here in DC this past Tuesday, and I have to say that the rocking was extreme.

But, as Levar Burton would say, you don’t have to take my word for it—check them out here.

But back to the festival. I’m rather chagrined to see that the follow-up to last year’s awesome Will Wright keynote (where we got to see him actually play Spore!) is an interview by over-hyped digital gift mogul Mark Zuckerberg. I call him a “digital gift mogul” because that’s all Facebook really sells. They just lost their “chief revenue officer” earlier this week, too. He says it’s because he wants to be a CEO, but I think it’s because he’s not interested in working for a company that covers its nut with nothing more than breathlessly-proffered VC and digital icons of Troll dolls and panties.

Anywho…Zuckerberg is a flavor of the month. Well maybe six months or so, but he doesn’t deserve to be the keynote speaker at SxSW Interactive. Especially when PC Magazine is putting out articles like this one, entitled “Facebook’s Death Spiral” just before the conference. A couple classes on graph theory and some regurgitated ideas that four or five other people have had before you does not a visionary make, and visionaries are who we’re supposed to have as keynote speakers @ SxSW. That’s a chair that’s been previously held by giants like Philip Glass, Malcolm Gladwell, Howard Rheingold, and Bruce Sterling. We’ll let Mark Cuban and Ana Marie Cox slip in under the door, even if they don’t really fit the mold. But even with them there, Zuck doesn’t belong in the club.

Calling Zuckerman a visionary for making Facebook after Friendster and MySpace (and a bazillion other, less famous general-purpose social networks) had been around for years is like comparing me to Merriwether Lewis because I drove from St. Louis to Montana in a Dodge Caravan. Sooner or later, Google will stitch together all their services, hire some badass interaction dudes like Adaptive Path or IDEO, and put Facebook out of their chumptastic misery.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here wondering if I can start an anti-keynote, like maybe at a 6th street bar, called something like “Let’s All List the Technical, Philisophical, and Interactional Reasons that Facebook isn’t Worth $15 Billion.”

I wonder how many people would show?