San Francisco Blogger Feast

Microsoft's Robert Scoble is in San Francisco for a few days and called a blogger dinner at the Chaat Cafe tonight, a brightly lit bistro with cheap Indian fare.

They didn't have or even know what Chapati was.....c'mon, how can you have an Indian meal without chapati? Even Om Malik, who btw, has an interesting post on the end of the personal blogger, agreed with me on this one.

There was a great turnout of bloggers and a few majors who are actually developing stuff that serves the blogosphere, like Technorati's Dave Sifry and Feedster's Scott Rafer.

In addition, a few media 'old timers' showed up who also have blogs like Steve Gillmor and Dan Farber. And then there were just old timers old timers, such as Marc Canter, who brought his adorable two little girls with him.

Conversations in my circle were varied, but mostly focused on future stuff around Mozilla, Longhorn, podcasting and vlogs, as well as more basic conversations like the need for better categorization in blogs and the integration of social networking tools into applications we already use. And they have to be a lot better than they are and more importantly work. While LinkedIn might be cool and has some interesting possibilities, I haven't found it to be more productive than picking up the phone or shooting someone an email.

Steve Sloan from San Jose State University was taking notes and interviewing people on what's next and what's useful - things that he might be able to integrate into the university, while the Technorati developers sat at their own table next to the window (why do developers do that??). I think there could be a consulting opportunity here.....one which trains geeks how to mix and mingle at social functions.

Gotta love geeks though, for if they didn't stay focused, we wouldn't have all these fabulous tools that are changing the world.

Other interesting bloggers and technologists included Laszlo System's Lyndon Wong, Michael Eakes, Christopher Carfi, Dori Smith, Tantek Celik, Niall Kennedy, Thomas Hawk, Russell Beattie, Pierre Wolff, and Jason Defillippo.