Blog dinner: A night to remember

At one point last night, someone remarked, “This may be one of the largest gatherings of bloggers who’ve gotten together outside of a conference.” That sounds about right. Two dozen bloggers, high tech folks and media people came together and stormed the Bastille last night for an evening of dining and socializing in San Francisco.

If the evening had a theme, it may have been social software, for many of those in attendance are at the forefront of new social network and information-sharing technologies.

Susan Mernit, Deeje Cooley and I served as hosts, and I was particularly happy that my suggestion of the French bistro in San Francisco’s French restaurant row was well received.

I surveyed a number of bloggers to get their thoughts about the most useful way to get feedback from people about the book chapters I’ve written so far, and this is what they said (see item immediately above).

Here are the photos I took last night. (The lighting left a lot to be desired, but it was a good-looking crowd.)

And here is the list of those in attendance and their blogs (we didn’t exchange blog urls so I got most of these from Google). Send corrections, additional info and the like to me here, or post a comment below.

Susan Mernit
Principal, 5Group; former AOL & Netscape VP
Blog: Susan Mernit’s Blog: Navigating the Info Jungle

JD Lasica
Writer, journalist, finishing a book about the personal media revolution; former editorial manager of BabyCenter, iVendor, Microsoft San Francisco Sidewalk
Blog: New Media Musings

Deeje Cooley
Founder and CEO of BloggerJack

Craig Newmark
Founder of craigslist, Blog: craigblog

Dan Gillmor
San Jose Mercury News business columnist, writing a book on participatory journalism
Blog: eJournal

Christopher Allen
Tech entrepreneur, Founder, Alacrity Ventures
Blog: LifeWithAlacrity

Stuart Henshall
Founder, Stuart Henshall & Associates; former scenario practitioner with GBN Global Business Network; Skype power user
Blog: Unbound Spiral

Chris Alden
Co-founder, Red Herring
Blog: r21: Freedom works

Kevin Burton
Creator of NewsMonster

George Kelly
Copy editor on news desk, Contra Costa Times
Blog: AllAboutGeorge

Mark Graham
Vice President of Engineering, iVillage; former Director of Business Development, The WELL, and Founding President, Whole Earth Networks

Brad de Graf
Internet Archive; Co-founder of Media Venture Collective, a grass-roots, not-for-profit venture fund and media democracy brain trust

Nina Davis
Consultant for AlwaysOn Network

Phil Wolff
Evanwolf Group; East Bay for Kerry
Blog: a klog apart

Tom Mangan
Copy editor, features, the San Jose Mercury News
Blogs: Print the Chaff; Banned for Life

Moses Ma
Organizer, C Summit: Camera phones, communication, culture, commerce (Maui, April 27-30, 2004)

Heather Schlegel
Independent agent, former AOL staffer
Blog: heathervescent

Christian Crumlish
Publisher, editor, writer
Blog: Radio Free Blogistan

Geoff Goodfellow
Inventor of wireless email, living in Prague. Here’s a writeup in the Prague Post from last month.
Blog: From the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow

Peter Merholz
One of the first bloggers, he coined the term “blog”
Blog: PeterMe

Mary Hodder
Student, enterpreneur, metadata czarina
Blogs: Berkeley IP Blog, Napsterization

Tim Catlin
(I didn’t get a chance to speak with Tim)

Jeff Ubois
Founder, Disappearing Inc.; former contractor for Internet2, Alexa Internet, Sun, Oracle, Cisco, Stratacom, Viant
Blog: Spin Spin

Art McGee
communications, media, and technology consultant with the Online Policy Group

Michael Tolson
(I didn’t get to speak much with Michael; is he a graphic artist?)

Some of those who attended have already posted entries on the dinner, such as Tom Mangan, Susan, and George Kelly, who also took some photos.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.