• Julia Allison, professional lifecaster/shill blogger.
  
• Sarah Lacy, noted interviewer, interrupter, and lover of junkets. (Speaking of which, we're told this LA trip is all expenses paid. With a swanky hotel!)
  
• Shira Lazar, who hosts TV shows on KNBC and "Reelz," dated Kevin Rose, flirted with Mike Arrington and was Julia Allison's date to the inauguration.
  
• Brigitte Dale, video blogger for ABC Family.
• Scoble. We hear manic blogger/Twitterer/FriendFeed-er and ex Microsoft flack Robert Scoble is to contribute his insights as well.

So basically, all the top brain power in one spot.

Allison uploaded the picture above of this dot-com Algonquin Round Table, in their flip-flops and beach clothes. We cannot wait to read their report.

The Summit Series, an event for Internet entrepreneurs under the age of 36, is gearing up for a third get-together, this time in Aspen.

Rowland, the founder of Hilary Magazine and New Faces, a modeling agency, was one of the few women who went to the last Summit Series, a phenomenally ill-timed November junket in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, for some 60 Internet-industry second-raters who partied and drank in the midst of an economic meltdown. (One attendee, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, came straight from laying off 8 percent of his workforce.)

The event was supposed to be off the record, with no names released, no photos posted, and no mention made of the event's existence. But Rowland, a very attractive blonde with a decidedly unattractive penchant for name-dropping, issued a press release and posted photos of the event for her vast number of Facebook friends. The summit's stated mission was the exchange of ideas and the promotion of charitable works. Perhaps that happened! But if so, Rowland's photographs did not document it:

Among the people Rowland exposed: Drop.io founder Sam Lessin, the son of a Wall Street banker who took 19 of his closest friends to his dad's vacation home in Cyprus, where they filmed a video of their frolics. The clip leaked and the event, promptly dubbed "Camp Cyprus," became an infamous example of the Web 2.0 set's irrational exuberance. In other words, Summit Series Mexico was only the second money-wasting event Lessin, whose startup is hardly setting the world on fire, got caught attending.

And that's the problem that the Summit Series' organizers are now facing. Rowland has proven that they can't keep the event private, and the likes of Lessin surely don't want to be caught out as wastrels a third time. Elliott Bisnow, the event's founder, is also trying to cajole invitees to the four-day Aspen event to pay $3,000; past events were free save for airfare. (Here's the full text of his emails, including an amusing followup to beg for ticket purchases.)

I suppose Bisnow could disinvite Rowland. But there will always be someone willing to barter privacy for a little taste of fame. Isn't that what the Internet was made for? With all her experience, Rowland should know that better than anyone.

Le Web is the brainchild of Loic Le Meur, an entrepreneur best known for peddling a worthless French blog startup to Six Apart, who has parlayed his very slight resume into press clips that include being named one of BusinessWeek's 25 most important people on the Web. (One of the 25 most self-important, more like it.)

Le Meur is handsome enough, improbably tall for a Frenchman, and charming when he wants to be. As a businessman, he's hopeless; his online-video startup, Seesmic, recently had layoffs and is said to be a hot mess. But it's as a showman that Le Meur excels. He outraged bloggers in 2006 by inviting Nicolas Sarkozy, then a French presidential candidate, to speak. (His critics viewed the invitation as crassly sullying the purity of a Web-focused event — as if the Internet were somehow apart from politics.)

To understand the problem, look no further than the guest list, which includes media ubiquity Marissa Mayer, the Google VP in charge of looking good and making money; an also-ran at MySpace; and Chris Anderson, organizer of the TED conference series. Just imagine: You can fly to Europe to attend a tech conference, where you can hear an organizer of a tech conference speak!

And yet people pay thousands of dollars — rather, charge thousands of dollars to their expense accounts — to do exactly that. They attend parties where they can meet exactly the same crowd they just saw last month at Web 2.0 Summit, and before that at TechCrunch50, and before that at Brainstorm, and before that at D6. Round and round they ride, on the tech-junket carousel. Why doesn't the tech-conference crowd give some of their social-networking tools a try and just gab with each other online? At a time when 533,000 Americans lost their jobs last month, that seems less embarrassing than flying to France to party.

(Photo via referencement-internet)

Here's what should enrage you as you read it: Unlike the Cyprus trip, this one is ostensibly a work event, paid for by investors and shareholders. (I suppose a handful of entrepreneurs may have bought their own tickets, but in the hopes of paying themselves back by scoring an investment.) What's the agenda for this passel of languorous corporate dealmakers, ebullient entrepreneurs, and phlegmatic venture capitalists? They party. You pay. Later on, they consummate some deals with their pals that they would have struck anyway, crediting the boondoggle junket for "making the connection."

Last year's event was an epic caper, marked by drink-throwing, late-night excursions, and salacious rumors of barside canoodling. Here's whose exploits we're looking forward to reporting, thanks to the moles we've placed throughout Hornik's guest list: