The Social

SAN FRANCISCO--Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: "Social Search," a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member's social-network contact circle.

It'll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you'll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.

"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends' Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend's blog.

This comes on the same day that Google announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time "tweets" to search results. That's another product that has yet to actually launch.

"The idea is for...these fast-rising queries, where there's a period of time (when there are) actually tweets about that topic, and the definitive news source hasn't been written yet," Mayer said of the Twitter partnership, declining to disclose its financial terms.

This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PT.

NEW YORK--Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was coy about exactly why he isn't thrilled with Google's attempt to forge its way into the digital publishing business.

"We have strong opinions about that issue which I'm not going to share," Bezos said to interviewer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference. "But, clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited."

In a court battle rife with twists, turns, and delays, Google has been attempting to push forward its Book Search initiative, which could potentially give the Mountain View, Calif., tech giant exclusive access to digital editions of some out-of-print books. That could, as Levy pointed out, get in the way of Amazon's goal of offering every book ever printed in every language on the Kindle and its new, bigger Kindle DX sibling. And it sounds like that's where Amazon has some beef.

"There are many forces of work looking at that and saying it doesn't seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights," Bezos said.

Bezos was speaking at the conference, which had the subtitle "Disruptive by Design," to talk about Amazon's legacy of shaking up the retail industry and now potentially the publishing industry with its Kindle e-reader device. Most of his talk was focused on the sort of business advice that one might expect a tech company to provide to a room full of big-business and old-media types ("be stubborn on the big things and very flexible on the details," "you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time"), but he did get a few minutes to talk about how he thinks the Kindle is changing things.

In New York, a longtime global hub of the beleaguered publishing, media, and advertising industries, what he had to say was particularly weighted. The Kindle, after all, is doing extremely well: Bezos said that out of the entire offering of 300,000 books available for both the Kindle and physical retail on Amazon, that the Kindle's sales are 35 percent of physical books' after only 18 months on the market.

"Internally, we are startled and astonished by that statistic," Bezos said.

But he wouldn't promise that the device will singlehandedly save the newspaper industry.

"I never want to convey that I think we have a sinecure with any particular product offering, but if we execute well and other companies that do these kinds of electronic readers, that is going to be part of what happens with newspapers," Bezos said. "And I do think there are going to be multiple companies competing with reading devices and I think there's room for multiple winners."

Like much of the speakers at the Wired Business Conference, Bezos talked extensively about how things have changed over the past few years, and how it demands a deep rethinking of business practices in all industries. In this case, he was talking about the media business.

"Unfortunately, there's a collision of several major issues happening to the magazine, newspaper, and publishing industries all at once, including most recently the recession which has taken a bad situation and made it much worse," he said. "But the biggest structural problem in my opinion is there's just so much supply of advertising space. That's a fundamental problem that's not going to go away."

But at the same time--in keeping with the conference's theme--there's an extraordinary amount of opportunity, Bezos insisted.

"Some of the most important barriers to entry in that industry have been dissolved, and they've been dissolved permanently."

IAC chair Barry Diller at last week's Founders Club party.

(Credit: Alexander Porter/New York Founders Club)

NEW YORK--From a seventh-floor roof deck at Rockefeller Center, Barry Diller, head of digital-media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp, was addressing the well-dressed crowd at Thursday evening's Founders Club cocktail party.

"There was a time when 'network' was all the buildings on Sixth Avenue," Diller said, gesturing to the west, home to the midtown office buildings that have housed New York's once-unflappable broadcast and print media powerhouses for decades, "and of course now it means something totally different."

The Founders Club, with a watertight guest list, drinks courtesy of Patron tequila, and a decorative pool filled with miniature sailboats bearing the logos of New York's most talked-about start-ups (perhaps a nod to host Diller, an avid yachtsman), was one of the more highbrow events at the second annual Internet Week New York, which culminates Monday night with the Webby Awards gala.

In spite of how rough things have been for the industry over the past year, energy levels were high and there was no shortage of things to do. Internet Week attendees could fill their week up with panels, networking breakfasts, ad industry conferences, start-up expos, and loads of parties. ("It's miraculous that you are all standing up, because all I hear about are these parties!" Diller exclaimed at Founders Club.)

One thing's for sure: New York's tech and digital-media community has been humbled and chastened, and it's ready to get back on its feet. Unfortunately, now there's a whole new problem: what next?

On the bright side, there seemed to be near-universal agreement at Internet Week that changing times present opportunities to explore new territory. A handful of people noted throughout the week that online video-related events had especially high rates of attendance, as traditional media and advertising companies sent marketers and business-development types out to figure out just how they can make a buck or two off it.

There are legitimate reasons for some of this optimism, especially for smaller companies that haven't exactly had the easiest time in New York to begin with. Rents are cheaper now. Prospective employees are willing to work for lower salaries. And once-dominant New York industries have been brought down a few notches, leaving scrappy start-ups in a position that's far from undesirable--especially since big media and finance companies, short on ideas for how to stay afloat, have finally started to listen to them.

"On behalf of the crippled United States economy and the crippled New York City economy, I'd like to thank you for doing what you do," Business Insider founder and former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget said to an audience of entrepreneurs and venture capital types at the blog's "Startup 2009" pitch competition Wednesday. "When you hear people talking about green shoots in this environment, this is what they're talking about."

Even the big companies seem to think the little guys are doing something right, or at least, in difficult times, they can make it seem a little sunnier by putting an entrepreneurial spin on things. New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, for example, referred to AOL as "the world's largest start-up-slash-turnaround." He's not entirely off base. In New York, anything digital has historically been a bootstrapping industry in and of itself.

"I think the financial meltdown might be the best thing that ever happened to the New York start-up scene," Chris Dixon, co-founder of the fledgling Hunch, told CNET News at the Founders Club event. Dixon, who sold his previous company, SiteAdvisor, to McAfee in 2006, believes that in the Web 2.0 boom, New York's tech scene was even more upstaged by the San Francisco Bay Area's than it had been in the first dot-com gold rush. "(There were) hedge funds sucking up all the talent like they didn't in the '90s," he said.

But the excitement about the potential for innovation is tinged with plenty of confusion that can descend into downright cluelessness, brilliantly parodied in a YouTube-hosted music video called "Mad Avenue Blues" that was making the rounds last week and was the subject of many an Internet Week cocktail party conversation. Set to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie," the video details the panic that one of New York's biggest industries went through in "the year the media died," and its lyrics full of marketing jargon are uncomfortably spot-on.

All joking aside, Internet Week made it clear that across the industry, nobody seems to be really sure what direction to take, and this can lead to major friction. In his opening address at Digitas' Digital Content NewFronts event on Wednesday, the ad agency's chief creative officer Mark Beeching gave an impassioned speech that included, among other things, the insistence that media companies give up on the fight against digital piracy because it's just not worth it.

"I can name a half dozen media executives who will have something to say about that," somebody remarked to me about Beeching's talk the following day, where even more digital-advertising types had gathered for cocktails and a presentation from ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky, which has gained serious geek street cred for edgy campaigns like the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" stunt.

At least they can agree on Twitter
Then there was the back-and-forth banter in the highly anticipated I Want Media panel on Wednesday, where it seemed like the only thing the panelists--who came from both print and digital media--could agree on was that the industry's more or less enamored with Twitter. Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, a firm advocate of media outlets charging for online content, sparred onstage with Nick Denton, founder of entertainment and gossip blog network Gawker Media, who stands staunchly in favor of advertising.

"There's not enough advertising out there to support us," Murray insisted. "The model, digitally, in part because it's so easy to move from place to place, just doesn't work."

Denton retorted, "That is so not true," claiming that "most newspapers, apart from The Wall Street Journal and maybe the Financial Times, they have nothing that people are going to pay for."

But over the past year, as the crisis in the media industry grew worse, Denton didn't sound quite as unflappable. Over the winter, he had been predicting a near total collapse for advertising-based content, and the company spent months trimming away the fat, casting aside unnecessary cargo. Gawker Media consolidated two blogs, sold several others, and laid off a number of writers and editors. It's probably turned into a far more efficient operation.

But things turned out better than he expected, and on Thursday night Gawker partnered with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for a party on the roof of the blog network's downtown headquarters--the latest in a parade of Gawker roof parties that started popping up as soon as the weather began to warm. There was, of course, an open bar. Waiters brought around trays of appetizers that were certainly several notches up from the fare at Gawker parties of yore, where the catering typically involved ordering pork dumplings en masse from somewhere in nearby Chinatown.

Guests weren't quite sure what was being offered to them. One of the appetizers, they learned upon asking, was pheasant. Another consisted of shot glasses of spicy tomato juice with oysters at the bottom. It was more "Mad Men" than media meltdown.

But ideally, that pheasant was eaten with the knowledge that the industry is still in a grave situation, and it's still not clear how or when it will end.

Where are the crowds? The Moscone Center was noticeably quieter this year at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Evan Bartlett)

SAN FRANCISCO--Stepping off an otherwise quiet street and through the door of the downtown restaurant Roe on Thursday night was, at first, like a foray into a secret fantasy world where no market crash or economic recession had ever happened.

It was the launch party for Yola.com, a rebranded Web publishing platform formerly known as SynthaSite, in conjunction with this week's Web 2.0 Expo down the street at the Moscone convention center. There was an open bar, of course: The signature cocktail was a kir royale, a blend of champagne and blackcurrant liqueur, so champagne flutes were the drinkware of choice in the darkened room. The music was loud. Yola's logo was everywhere--projected on the wall, on T-shirts handed out at the door, on stickers scattered across the bar for the taking.

Yet if you surveyed the scene, there were signs of conscious frugality. The guest list was tight and the party was kept small, with only the ground floor of the two-story Roe booked; the open bar eventually ended, and the kir royales stopped flowing. While Yola was a "silver" sponsor of the conference, the event had not been heavily publicized. The same applied to many of the other scattered parties at the convention. If you knew the details, you could slip into a fun and relatively low-key affair that might even have free drinks and snacks. It was all about doing a bit of digging.

With a "doing more with less" theme, change was in the air at the whole Web 2.0 Expo: This edition of the biannual confab, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, felt like the recession had scooped a hole out of it with a spork. Attendance rates were slightly down, and even though conference representatives said more than 8,000 people came, the halls of The Moscone Center were noticeably quieter than in years past. Yet this is still a must-attend for the majority of the industry. Exhibitors from big tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe, courting developer talent to populate their various platforms and services, said that this is the best way to reach the biggest audience.

And here's what that audience was hearing: that with the harrowing financial climate, there is opportunity in casting off centuries' worth of old institutions that now only serve to hamper innovation.

"The current global financial crisis is the Web's fault," author Douglas Rushkoff said in his Wednesday keynote. "It's a good thing, and...it's really the arresting of a 400- to 500-year process from which value has been extracted from people and companies unfairly and unproductively."

"Six hundred thousand jobs were lost last month, and we've got to believe that the Internet has something to do with the massive restructuring, reorganization, and revitalization of what is our future," Meetup founder Scott Heiferman said in a talk on Friday morning. "They say that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so there is this opportunity for us to turn our backs to the screen, to turn our backs to a centralized 20th-century culture where we are dependent on these bloated banks and insurance companies."

That's so last century
The irony lies in the fact that with so many talks at the expo fixed on the opportunities presented by financial difficulties, and the final death knells of the 20th-century way of doing things, the convention itself was still an old-school trade show. The expo floor was full (though not as full as last year) of colorful booths and talkative PR representatives, the panel lineup still packed with the usual marketing and programming buzzwords--ROI, SEO, PHP, RSS--and the art of the business card swap still paramount.

"There's just not a whole lot that's cool this year," one disappointed attendee told me. Another said he'd found that after last month's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, there was something stale about the Web 2.0 Expo, even though it was much healthier than many had anticipated. Maybe it's time for a reboot.

You see, if you got past the surface, did a little digging--just like with the after-hours scene--there were some noteworthy talks at Web 2.0 Expo. There was a seminar about just how much you need to know about wine in order to impress business associates, a crash course from Digg's director of business development for old-media types who want to capitalize on the social news craze, and a session about marketing insights from the creator of the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app. Keynote speakers like John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and the founders of indie T-shirt sensation Threadless, weren't exactly the sorts of conference highlights you'd expect.

In those talks, the lack of banter about monetization and user engagement was refreshing. The T-shirt clad Threadless guys, for example, didn't really seem to be in their element sitting on couches onstage for a keynote "conversation" in front of an auditorium of laptop-wielding conference-goers in uncomfortable chairs. They were 21st century dot-com heroes in a setting that some of the expo's out-with-the-old speakers would likely have characterized as so last century.

One of the biggest and most promising highlights of the conference was the after-hours Ignite offshoot, the latest in a series of wacky geek-culture seminars presented by O'Reilly and spearheaded by Web 2.0 organizer Brady Forrest. Seven hundred people packed into a nearby nightclub for a set of decidedly unorthodox presentations: a mandated number of PowerPoint slides, set on an automatic timer, so that no one could veer off topic or go over time. Ignite events are held all over the world and have quite a cult following; with presentations like "Mr. Hacker Goes To Washington" and "Demystifying Weird Japanese Toys and Tools," it wasn't your typical Web 2.0 Expo material.

Conference representatives seem to think that the conference format still has life in it. "The expo itself is not going to change. I think the content changes from year to year based on what the trends are like and what the market looks like," TechWeb community manager Janetti Chon told CNET News. "We try to be the conference that appeals to all Web enthusiasts...of course the conference will evolve as the market and industry evolve." She does have a point. Web 2.0 Expo is so big and far-reaching that putting any kind of new spin on it would risk alienating some sector of attendees.

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, said in his address to the expo on Wednesday that the term "Web 2.0" was "never intended to be a version number." But maybe it should've been. With all this talk, finally, about putting old institutions to rest, maybe the digerati should consider taking the plunge and making our industry gatherings something truly new. If we're going to talk about a fresh start, there are a lot of things that can be done to make our events reflect it.

From what it sounds like, many of us are ready for it.

The impromptu SXSWi party at the Driskill Hotel, one of the many sporadic parties that have been redefining the conference's nightlife scene.

(Credit: Brian Solis, via Flickr)

AUSTIN, Texas--Over a lunch of fajitas at the Iron Cactus restaurant Sunday, one of my friends here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival shrugged and said, "I'm just not into the party scene this year. It's all a little weird."

I had to concur. SXSWi, after all, is known for its wild parties. But two nights in, I've clocked in a total of 20 minutes at them before opting to hang out elsewhere, and I'm not the only one.

There are obviously a ton of people going to this year's bashes--the line at the late-night PureVolume House was ridiculously long on Saturday night, I hear, and the Digg party was packed with fans eager to see Diggnation hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht do a live taping of the show. But many people I've talked to, especially veteran SXSWi-goers, say they're skipping many of the big, planned soirees.

There are a couple of reasons, I think. First there's the fact that budget cuts have meant that admission to a party no longer guarantees access to an open bar. That's enough to make some people just want to hang out somewhere random where it won't be as crowded.

Then there's the fact that SXSWi has gotten simply huge: last year's long lines led to impromptu offshoot parties, and the heavy influence of Twitter and the half dozen location-based networking tools people are using have meant it's easy to find out where your real friends are. On Saturday night, for example, it seems like everyone wound up at the downtown Driskill Hotel via word of mouth.

It's not just the bar scene. Conference attendees have been shaking up the whole panels-by-day, parties-by-night model with surprise cupcake giveaways, scavenger hunts, games of geek Bingo, and something called "SXSW Star Wars" that I don't quite understand. GirlGamer.com wired an RV with a Rock Band game and has been conducting mobile karaoke excursions. (You might've seen me with some friends on Friday night running up and down 6th St. trying to catch it and get onboard. We succeeded.) Honestly, it's sort of more fun and unpredictable this way.

But who knows? This may all change on Sunday night with Facebook's big annual bash.

This is about one-fifteenth of the line to get a SXSW badge.

(Credit: Andrew Mager/CBS Interactive)

AUSTIN, Texas--OK, there has got to be a better way to do this.

I arrived at the Austin Convention Center 45 minutes before the start of a talk on Friday afternoon that I was hoping to catch, "The Ecosystem of News" led by Outside.in founder Steven Johnson. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough time: the line-waiting time was clocking in at around an hour.

By the time I made it over to the room where Johnson's talk was being held, the room was full and no one else was being allowed in. There was no simulcast. (Luckily, my colleague Daniel Terdiman was there to see what Johnson had to say.)

The conference that's arguably the biggest must-attend for the digitally edgy has a check-in process that was painfully analog; I've been to plenty of big tech-industry trade shows and I've never waited for that long in line. Granted, with the number of concerts and film screenings that are part of the two other South by Southwest extravaganzas (SXSW Music and SXSW Film) are a big draw, and SXSW is consequently more likely to have to deal with people making counterfeit badges and sneaking into events than, say, the Web 2.0 Expo. And to be fair, SXSW Film attendees were waiting in the same line as those for SXSWi.

But still. You don't want the biggest topic of conversation at Day 1's after-parties to be the fact that it took an hour just to check in. Here's my suggestion for SXSWi 2010: Have a contest to revolutionize the conference check-in process. It's going to be especially crucial if SXSWi continues to grow. There are so many creative minds that come to this event every year; there would certainly be some interesting ideas.

For the winner, give away a jet pack or something. Those will exist in a year, right?

AUSTIN, Texas--I'm in Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, finally. And I'm exhausted. Last night, some friends convinced me that it would be a good idea to watch the Syracuse-University of Connecticut basketball game on TV until the end, and if you read the sports section this morning, you'll know that it went into six overtimes. I was able to get, oh, three hours of sleep.

Apparently, "nerd bird" is SXSWi slang for an Austin-bound plane coming from a city like New York or San Francisco, where there would be plenty of geeks flocking to the conference. It's totally true.

My early-morning JetBlue flight from New York contained folks from Gawker, Mashable, AllThingsD, and CrunchGear. However, unlike a Thursday flight from San Francisco that happened to host Digg founder Kevin Rose, there was no flight attendant encouraging us all to Twitter upon arrival.

So what's the buzz right now? The weather is unseasonably chilly and rainy. The line to pick up conference badges is screamingly long, and I'm about to go deal with that. Friday has only a limited number of panels and discussions.

Beyond that, everyone seems particularly eager to just have some fun. And some cool SXSWi-centric games are popping up. A few days ago, something called SXSW Bingo started making the rounds. It's a sort of Bingo scavenger hunt for which players are tasked with taking mobile photos of targets that range from Robert Scoble to a Snuggie.

I've also heard that Paparazzi, an iPhone game from Socialbomb that attempts to rank players by fame stemming from how many times they show up in mobile photos, may be another time-waster of choice.

I wonder if wacky games, scavenger hunts, and other outside-the-conference shenanigans will have a bigger presence at SXSWi 2009 than they may have in the past. My reasons for thinking so are twofold.

First, given the economic conditions we're all dealing with, a lot of people in the tech and media industries are looking for something to ease the stress. I think that any out-of-work geek would smile at the fact that blogger Ariel Waldman is sporadically twittering the locations where she is giving away free cupcakes.

Second, SXSWi was big last year, and it's bigger this year. The quirky digerati who have traditionally dominated SXSWi's core may be looking for new ways to hang out, now that the conference has grown increasingly corporate.

My CBS Interactive colleague Andrew Mager is also at the conference, and he is currently playing a Twitter-organized game of "Assassins." I'm not quite sure how it works, but he has reported that he was kidnapped by rival players. Eek!

This is part four of a four-part series. Here are part one (the launches), part two (the panels), and part three (the parties).

So there are just a few hours left before I have to head to the airport and hop a flight to Austin for this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival, and I wanted to take up just one more blog post to talk about what the week's big trends are going to be. Remember last year when everyone kept asking, "So what's this year's Twitter?" and then it didn't happen? Yeah. It won't happen this year, either.

The breakout Web app at SXSWi 2008 was arguably Sched.org, which one of the founders of music blog aggregator The Hype Machine created as a way to let conference-goers organize their agendas. But its event-centric focus meant that it didn't catch on the way Twitter did in 2007. I'm pretty sure we won't see another Twitter-like breakout this year, and I think most veteran SXSWi-goers would agree. That was a case of the perfect time and the perfect place, and two years later it's still the dot-com du jour. You don't see something like that every year.

That said, we may see some moderate SXSWi stars: Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, and FourSquare are all going to be gunning for the top spot in location-based social networking at a conference where finding out where everyone goes after-hours is crucial.

Expect a lot of talk about the future of media and entertainment. Newspapers are dying, Twitter's all over the news as a form of media consumption, and the digital TV and movie wars are raging like 300. You'll be hearing more from me on this one.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I wouldn't be surprised if the economic recession took a back burner at SXSWi. At a more buttoned-up conference like the Web 2.0 Expo, which is happening later this month in San Francisco, I imagine it'll be front and center. But SXSWi is full of innovators and dreamers, and the what's-next focus may mean that many speakers and panelists opt to simply accept the fact that budgets are tight and times are hard, and instead target the future. Whether that comes across as hardy optimism or just out-of-touch, well, we'll have to see.

See you in Austin!

This is part three of a four-part series. Here are part one and part two.

Surprise: Despite budget cuts and a general malaise about making a big, bubbly scene when loads of people in the tech industry are out of work or in danger of losing their jobs, there are still a ton of parties at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which starts Friday in Austin, Texas. There will be fewer open bars for sure; nevertheless, rest assured that you'll still be able to find far more nightlife options than you could possibly want. They do refer to it as "spring break for geeks," after all.

You'll probably see a lot of the same people at most of these parties, the majority of which require only an SXSWi conference badge for entry (which means the lines get long). But the parties themselves vary wildly in size and vibe.

Some are off-the-walls wacky, like the "Pasties and Pastries Burlesque Cupcake Cookoff" on Friday night, or off-the-walls wacky for a good cause, like the Bacon-Flavored Benefit for the Children's Music Fund, which asks for a $5 donation at the door. On Monday evening there's something called Nuclear Taco Night. I don't think I'm "in" enough with the SXSWi scene to even start to explain that.

Many of the earlier parties (i.e. the ones that start at 6:30 p.m.) are networking-friendly cocktail hours sponsored by big and medium-size companies like Rackspace, several Microsoft divisions, and Google (well, Google Reader and Blogger). Then, of course, there's the official SXSWi party on Saturday night. Sponsored by Frog Design, it's held every year at the Mexican American Cultural Center, which is thankfully big enough to accommodate attendees but is maddeningly far from the rest of the SXSWi mayhem. With temperatures on Friday and Saturday expected to be unseasonably chilly, this partly outdoors party may be smaller than last year's.

The late-night parties will likely just be total nuthouses. Some of these, like Facebook's second annual "friends.get" party at the sceney Pangaea nightclub on Sunday night or RockYou's St. Patrick's Day bash at the Speakeasy music hall on Tuesday, have a guest-list policy and will be tough to get into. Others, like the annual Bigg Digg Shindigg (hosted by...um, Digg) are more open but will still likely have a line snaking around the block.

Keep tabs on your Twitter feed, too. One unofficial party, called 32bit, isn't even disclosing its location until the last minute via Twitter. And last year, the party that took everybody by surprise happened when a bunch of popular Twitterers let their friends known that seven cases of wine had just been carted to a hotel lobby. Expect the flash-mob model to get repeated this year, probably several times.

P.S.: Here's one you should totally check out: CNET's own Buzz Out Loud podcast is having a mixer at the Cedar Door on Friday at 6:30 p.m., after its live show taping.