Thanks to an invite from Buddy Brit and $45 disposable income, I got to rub elbows with some of the digerati last night, supping at Joi Ito's dinner at LuLu's in SoMa. I sat across from the Director of Business Development for Red Herring (which I thought was defunct but has been given new life), and between one of the directors of the EFF and the guy behind Tribe.net, a kind of next-gen Friendster. It was an interesting experience.

I was young and poor for the crowd, uneasy with the aristocratic air that occasionally wafted through. I'm still not free of classism. Not that these people are stuffy or victorian or even looked down their nose at me and my black hoodie. In fact, I got an email fishing for extra dollars; the booze went over budget. But there is a kind of insiderism that rears its head from time to time, something to do with ready capital, tastes and a specific strain of education I think. A few glasses of wine helped dull that sensation, and I spieled about my organization a little; listened to people talk about their Tivo habbits, attending film festivals, social software, and the like.

The most valuable connection I made was with Steven Clift, who's an old hand at e-politics in Minnesota, next week's research focus for MfA). The person I most wanted to talk to and didn't was Howard Rheingold, who's "paint your shoes!" meme-card I carry in my wallet. The most fun moment was having a jet-lagged and boozy Ito physically inquire as to why I was massaging the bridge of my nose. The most interesting thing was hearing Doc Searls talk: he sounds younger than most of the 30-somethings there, and gives off the enthusiastic energy of a big-wave surfer dude. Not what I expected.

Namedrop namedrop blah blah blah. The real lession I picked up is that people are planning on making tons of money off of social software. I don't know how I feel about that.

Pedaling down the mission on my way home it occurred to me that having 100,000 unique visitors to your blog every month must be as potentially corrupting as any other form of celebrity. At the very least it presents a distancing information asymmetry; people read your site and they feel like they've had an interaction with you, which is true from their perspective, but you haven't learned anything about them. I get that from my friends, so I imagine it must be a strange land indeed for these curve-busting trend-surfers. I'm happy to do my own thing in my own time; but I want MfA to be wildly successful. There's an angle here somewhere.