Some of the people appearing at the event include iJustine, ShayCarl, Grace Helbig from DailyGrace, True Blood actress Janina Gavankar, actor Zachary Levi, American Idol’s Pia Toscano and Jared Lee as well as Caine Monroy of Caine’s Arcade. There is also going to be a live performance from Pentatonix, and the My Drunk Kitchen folks will show how to make eggnog. Most of the action will happen in What’s Trending’s Los Angeles studio, but some folks will be in New York as well.

Lazar called the event “inspired by telethons, but for the digital age” when I talked to her Wednesday. That means that some of the fundraising is also a bit more unconventional: What’s Trending sponsor Virgin Mobile has vowed to donate $1 for every tweet featuring the hashtag #Tubeathon, with a total commitment of $50,000.

The telethon isn’t officially endorsed or sponsored by Google, but it fits in quite well with the company’s mission to bring more professionally-produced content to YouTube — and it could foreshadow a change of focus towards live entertainment. “It is representing a changing landscape,” agreed Lazar, adding: “We are setting the bar, we are creating the foundation for this space right now.”

Lazar’s show What’s Trending underwent a change of focus a couple of months ago, when it switched from a general Internet pop culture focus to a daily format that highlights trends on YouTube. Lazar told me that the new format has been working well for her team, both in terms of viewership and partnerships with big brands. Part of this has to do with the fact that more and more YouTube viewers are discovering live programming on the site. “There is something about live that is very special,” said Lazar.

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What’s Trending launched on CBS News in May of 2011, but the broadcaster quickly severed ties after a What’s Trending employee tweeted a false rumor about Steve Jobs’ passing. The What’s Trending team continued to produce the show and distribute it through sites like YouTube, Ustream and Livestream, and even started a second season in February.

For YouTube, this could be an important step towards more consistent live programming. The site has been investing more than $100 million in premium programming, but most of these channels have focused on on-demand clips, with the notable exception of My Damn Channel. What’s Trending isn’t part of YouTube’s premium channel initiative, but instead remains independent, according to a spokesperson.

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(Context: I’m a 31-year-old CEO of  a tech and creative agency, iStrategyLabs. This year will be my fourth trip to SXSW.)

1. Ask everyone what they’re up to before you pimp what you’re doing. Nobody cares about your crappy startup (even if it’s not crappy). People care about what they’re doing and what their problems are. If you can help them with what they’re doing, or solve their problem, then they’re instantly going to love you.
2. Don’t sell too hard or you’ll just look like a schmuck. Although SXSW is only a few days long, it is both a sprint and a marathon. I’ve done deals with people two or three years after first meeting them at SXSW. Those have been the biggest and best deals of my career, and they didn’t come about because I went to SXSW to sell something.
3. Love first. Sales second. There’s plenty of time to sell after SXSW. But there’s a limited amount of time during the conference to meet lots of people and make them absolutely love you. Focus on getting people to fall in love with you, and everything else will follow.
4. Working a room of 100 amazing people is better than hitting 10 events filled with less-than-awesome people. Party and panel hopping is great. I do a ton of it, but I only leave if the people aren’t awesome. If they are amazing, I stay there as long as it makes sense. Amazing is subjective. You need to figure this out for yourself. For me, amazing people are those who teach me something new. If I’m not learning, I move on.
5. Shticks are valuable social devices. Have at least one. You need something to talk about other than your startup. For example, this year GE hired us to hack one of their appliances so that people have to use Foursquare check-ins to get the beer GE put inside. That’s cool. I can pimp that to everyone, and tell them to go check in to get free beer. They don’t care about “iStrategyLabs’s new Social Machines offering that does blah blah blah.” They want free beer. They’ll tell other people about the cool way I hooked them up with free beer. A few months from now, this will lead to someone hiring me and paying me $200,000. All because they remembered the free beer.
6. Don’t linger. Lingerers are lame. Absolutely never sweat the web-celebs. Even if you see Shira Lazar, Pete Cashmore, Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose hanging out at Six Lounge, don’t get all up in their grill like a high school basket ball fan meeting LeBron James. Talk to people like they’re just as influential as you are and that they’re normal humans. Say hello. Try to make a real connection. And move on — quickly.
7. Forget about balancing work and fun. Eat this festival alive, and come out the other end ready to step up your game. If you’re at SXSW, your work is probably really fun. If you work isn’t fun — then you should be looking for a new job at SXSW.
8. Guys: Don’t be a non-stop hit-on-cute-tech-and-Texas-girls machine. That’s the creepiest thing you could do. It could damage your personal brand and your company, and you might miss an opportunity to connect meaningfully with the opposite sex – cutting off the possibility of a great business outcome or long-term friendship.
9. Gals: Avoid the mechanical bull at the Rebels Honky-Tonk. Seriously. You don’t want to end up tagged on Facebook by colleagues when you’re half (or fully drunk) and potentially exposing yourself. I’ve seen this happen.
10. Geeks of all stripes: Don’t trust anyone who says SXSW sucks. That’s like saying chocolate doesn’t taste good or that sunsets are ugly. It’s just crazy talk. Your SXSW lanyard is your golden ticket to personal and professional nerd heaven. Enjoy it!

Peter Corbett is the CEO of iStrategyLabs, a creative social agency. He tweets at @corbett3000.

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The show, after a first season that ran from May to December 2011, is premiering its second season this Wednesday, with the first episode featuring comedian Margaret Cho and a live performance by John West. In addition, a What’s Trending app will hopefully be available for iOS devices sometime in the next week, allowing users to watch and chat live — plus a notification feature to let you know when the show is about to go live.

For this new season, Berger said in a phone interview that the show’s focus will stay on news as well as Internet culture — in general, “What’s happening online that people need to know about.”

“Trending topics are the new news, and there are communities out there not being served this stuff,” Berger said. This means the show’s coverage ranges from the latest meme, to Justin Bieber, to Occupy Wall Street — but with an eye toward entertainment. “When we’re at our best, we’re bringing you the people behind these stories in a fun and informative way,” he added.

Hip-hop artists will also continue to have a large presence on the show: “I’d like to say that it’s because I’m a huge hip-hop fan, but it’s not,” Berger said. “When it comes to social media, a lot of the people who have really gone after these tools are hip-hop artists — they were first to go out and energize those communities, and have built up huge followings. So there’s a lot of overlap.” (When you consider that the most tweeted event of 2011 was Beyonce announcing that she and husband Jay-Z were about to have a baby, it’s hard to deny that.)

That’s not all that’s on the horizon. While in its first season, What’s Trending would stream live on Tuesdays, for season two, the show is switching to Wednesdays. This is because, according to Berger, immediately after this year’s SXSW, Trending will launch two new vertical channels, which will run on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The reason for waiting until after SXSW is that the What’s Trending team is currently prepping for three days of live coverage from the SXSW Convention Center, in partnership with a “major” undisclosed brand. In addition, Lazar is hosting Oscar Dailies, a five-episode series for ABC and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences leading up to this year’s Academy Awards.

It’s not a bad comeback, given that last September many thought Trending was dead in the water after an erroneous Twitter update prematurely announced the death of Steve Jobs. After that mishap, Trending‘s original partner CBS News killed its partnership with the show,, and it had to quickly rebuild its online presence as an independent series.

When asked if she felt that CBS had overreacted to the Jobs tweet, Lazar said no — “They did what they needed to do, and it was beyond our control.” And the decision had an upside: “[Being independent] affords us to look at ourselves as entrepreneurs. Big partners are essential in that, but the do-it-yourself mentality lets us create something new and be pioneers,” Lazar said. “We weathered the storm — which proves the power of what we’re doing.”

And despite the separation from CBS, What’s Trending has managed to find an audience — during the week of CES 2012 (which Trending covered with a special episode live from Vegas), Trending videos across all platforms received over 100,000 views. No numbers are available for Trending‘s early episodes due to an NDA with CBS, but Berger characterized the show’s performance since those days as having “considerable growth.”

Looking forward, Lazar and Berger see this sort of event coverage as becoming a staple of Trending. “Being at big events is a really big deal for us — it allows us to take the conversation offline,” Lazar said. The team is already looking forward to covering Comic-Con, potentially in partnership with another brand.

And that event coverage, plus the planned verticals, are just part of Trending‘s strategy for evolving the show to the next level. “This year is really about going from one weekly live show, to building the brand out, to something much bigger,” Lazar said, “bridging the gap between traditional media and new media.”

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Created by Disrupt Group and directed by Brett Register, What’s Trending, as gleaned from interviews and sitting in on a rehearsal of the live show last week, is not so much a news series about the Internet as it is a show about current events and pop culture, as seen through the eyes of the Internet.

“Unlike some other shows that include social media as an added tool to the content, our content itself is social, and the show is powered by that conversation and our community,” Lazar said via email. “Everything we do involves digitally connected tools — from how we discover and source stories to how we curate them on the blog and on-air.”

Enabling this process is social media correspondent Melissa Jun Rowley, who will be bringing in comments and questions from Twitter and the chat room during the live show. In addition, Trending has partnered with the Tweetriver platform to display Twitter updates live on air, and “interest network” Sulia to help curate trending topics online.

The studio itself is in an impressive-looking loft overlooking the Hollywood hills, right down the street from the historic Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Constructed from scratch about a month ago, the space represents a significant commitment from CBS — which at this stage has greenlit the show for the next six months, thanks to sponsorship by AT&T.

Guests appearing in the first episode will include The Young Turks‘s Cenk Uygur, Dancing with the Stars contestant Chelsea Kane, and political consultant Joe Trippi, and the show structure at this point is versatile enough to accommodate any sort of breaking news or exploding viral phenomenon. In last Wednesday’s test show, politics and tech news were in equal proportion to funny viral videos and actor interviews, either via Skype or in studio. YouTube Trends will provide videos of note each week, Good Magazine offers profiles of people using social media for good causes and Column Five Media is on board to create dynamic video infographics similar to the one below.

The Tuesday at 1 PM ET airtime was very specifically picked because, according to Lazar, it’s the highest-trafficked time online, and in addition the show will be packaged for VOD delivery on YouTube and CBS’s digital networks.

But who will watch live? “Definitely people possibly at work, working from home — which many are these days — and even college students out of class or after school. Part of this is that we’re early days for doing this, so we’re experimenting, and we might just discover over time there’s a better way to do it. Thankfully, we have that ability to experiment, make those changes and listen to our audience,” Lazar said.

The What’s Trending blog offers up daily updates, and Lazar promises that should a story break, she’ll still shoot standalone video segments (similar to her past work for CBS News interviewing breaking viral video stars). The key to the show, though, will be capturing that up-to-the-minute feel on a weekly basis.

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Hosted by Shira Lazar, produced by Disrupt Studios and distributed by Next New Networks, Partners Project has so far featured the people behind Annoying Orange, Mystery Guitar Man, iJustine and ShayCarl — otherwise known as Dane Boedigheimer, Joe Penna, Justine Ezarik and, um, ShayCarl (real name unknown), four creators who have found unique ways of expressing themselves through the production of regular updates.

Formatted as a straight interview between Lazar and the subject, the conversation tends to focus on the practical and personal aspects of regular production, with an enduring message about the importance of working hard if you want to be successful.

The advice ranges, though, from general to specific — Boedigheimer, for example, emphasizes the importance of collaborating with other YouTube creators (a factor in his meteroic success), while Penna advises people to study software tutorials in order to create quality effects for their own videos.

This advice is scattered between the main interview videos and an additional “Partner Pro Tips” segment. The Pro Tips segments largely consist of the main interview edited with a focus towards guiding aspiring creators. It’d be cool if they all included more unique behind-the-scenes material (such as the Annoying Orange episode, in which Lazar learns how hard it is to portray a piece of animated fruit), but the concept of a dual focus is an intriguing one.

The show’s distribution format does a nice job of incorporating the kind of interactivity that gets users engaged on YouTube, including constant requests for questions, featured comments and outtake videos. Some episodes do feel a little lengthy at approximately 10 minutes, but production values are professional, and the cinematography and editing is adding some visual flair without intruding on the interviews.

“The Barbara Walters of YouTube,” ShayCarl calls Shira Lazar in episode three; while it’s meant jokingly, and Lazar isn’t pulling any huge emotional moments from her interview subjects, each interview does feature some genuine discussion about the YouTube world, which she ably enables. It’s not hard-hitting editorial, but from a talk show perspective, Partners Project does offer valuable insight into this emerging community.

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