Sara Winge, a vice president at O'Reilly Media, posted a message asking her boss to confirm his plans to speak at a Stanford event in June for a fee of $25,000. (It's since been deleted, but it's still archived in Twitter's search engine.) Since she'd posted about getting a drink earlier in the day, we're thinking that she might have forgotten to use Twitter's direct-messaging feature.

The subject, the "future of manufacturing," hardly seems like an area to which O'Reilly, who helped popularize the term "Web 2.0," might lend his expertise, but hey, times are tough and money is money. On an O'Reilly website, Winge is described as the "maestro of the O'Reilly media message." And yes, the message is clear: O'Reilly is a mid-tier blowhard for hire.

(Photo by kubina)

"I'm a PC" Apple spokesvillain John Hodgman couldn't decide which brand of speaker wire to buy.

Former Star editor Bonnie Fuller was sorry she wasn't single while hitting the slopes.

AP reporter Phil Elliott wished he'd paid more attention to Tennyson in college.

Wired editor Chris Anderson was mad at himself for hiring the bunch of smartasses who ran a chart just to mock his "Long Tail" theory.

CNET News's Caroline McCarthy wished she hadn't said anything at all.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

For starters, take Michael Slater, CEO of Collective Knowledge, who not only spoke recently at RailsConf, but also helped O'Reilly arrange a past invitation-only Foo event and is allowed to use O'Reilly HQ for his events.
Then there's Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs, a perennial O'Reilly OSCON speaker. Stonewall Software CEO John Viega has penned two O'Reilly books and made appearances at O'Reilly Conferences both in the States and abroad. Finally, there's eduFire CTO J. Scott Johnson, who co-wrote O'Reilly's Essential Blogging with Rael Dornfest, O'Reilly's ETCON conference chair and ex-CTO. And while Replicator founder Steve Leibman apparently has yet to strike a deal with O'Reilly, his Fab professor - MIT's Neil Gershenfeld - is an O'Reilly favorite and oversaw work Tim's son-in-law Saul Griffith did on his PhD at MIT. (Photo by takeshi)

In a blog post last week, Tim O'Reilly announced that VC arm O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, will be hosting an event in July called OATV Startup Camp, which bears more than a passing similarity to Sun's Startup Camp. Not only that, Sun has a trademark pending on the term 'Startup Camp'. So will O'Reilly be civil and pick a new name?

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg


• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big


• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"


• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow

I have had health challenges, and my body cannot handle wifi...it gives me headaches and makes me very sick. I would be unable to go to the store, shop. I have enough problems being limited in my travels, it is outrageous that a place so environmentally conscious would create this in our/my hometown. In Europe they are much more advanced than us, and there wifi is not allowed in cities in the European commonwealth.

(Photos by arwenoreilly)

So, our questions: Come on guys, quit blogging about net neutrality or whatever and give the people what they want. Who was on the party plane? Mitch? I'm checking your blog. Tim? That's some Radar I'd like to see. Zuck? I'm checking your status updates. Nothing. Don't let us down. Oh yeah, and Paul Boutin is in the market for a new bed. What size does the Google Jet have — King, California King, or Euro King? Oh, and did any of you cheapskate tech moguls reimburse Larry and Sergey for the cost of the flight?

I've heard that Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg will be on that flight. Basically, every Davos attendee from the Bay Area except me managed to hitch a ride back with Google.

Web 2.0 is supposed to be so easy a baby can use it — hence the color scheme. But when the experts try to plot out what it all means, stand back. Here's Tim O'Reilly's early attempt, What is Web 2.0:

Dion Hinchcliffe upped the ante in March with a post titled, Web 2.0 Software Models Evolve as the Conference Season Begins in Earnest. My takeaway: There's a conference season?

I suppose I need to include this one:

Enough already. I went back to O'Reilly's original post. The guy is sincerely brilliant, he just spends too much time editing advanced programming manuals. I started erasing parts of O'Reilly's diagram until I got down to what I think is the minimum for Mom:

Any questions?

Socialstream, a Google-backed research project at Carnegie Mellon University, fits right in with Fitzpatrick's and Recordon's interests. For Google, the notion of linking networks together, rather than trying to swim upstream and compete with MySpace and Facebook, makes perfect sense. Rather than trying to resurrect Google's failing Orkut network, Fitzpatrick could be joining Google to help it disrupt existing social networks' business models.

That's the likeliest plan for Fitzpatrick. But what to make of Recordon's rumored return to Six Apart? It seems strange on the surface for Recordon to be going back to the company just as Fitzpatrick, his good friend, is leaving. But good friends aren't always good coworkers. Recordon, by voting with his paycheck, seems to be signaling that Six Apart is not the truly troubled party here. It's Fitzpatrick.

What we hear, very quietly, from employees at Six Apart, where Fitzpatrick plans to work his last day on Friday, is that they're not at all sad to see Fitzpatrick go. Even LiveJournal loyalists, while showering the founder with praise, make a point of saying how little Fitzpatrick has contributed to the site he created since he sold it to Six Apart.

It all makes sense. "I'm not convinced I couldn't be just as helpful to Six Apart outside of Six Apart," he wrote recently in his LiveJournal. Practically speaking, technology that opens up social networks could benefit Six Apart's second-tier communities, LiveJournal and Vox, more than it helps the dominant players.

Then there's Fitzpatrick himself, a decidedly difficult employee. Coddled at Google by its lavish benefits and engineers-rule culture, the brilliant programmer will likely do fine. Faced with grown-up responsibilities at Six Apart, he veered between retreating and lashing out. Between business trips to Russia and a two-month sabbatical, he's spent relatively little time in the office this year, and what time he did spend wasn't pleasant, from all accounts, including Fitzpatrick's own.

Six Apart faces all sorts of challenges — not least of which is managing the mess of LiveJournal with which Fitzpatrick saddled the company. And, oddly enough for a blogging company, it struggles with coming right out and talking about its problems. But Fitzpatrick's departure, laced as it was with thinly veiled insults to his coworkers, we're now concluding, says more about him than the company he worked for. Leaving Six Apart, it seems, really is the best thing he could do for the company.

Software makers have standard terms for stuff that isn't ready to sell to customers yet. Distilling the extensive Wikipedia entry to two lines:

• alpha — the first protean, buggy, incomplete version of a program worth test-driving. It has nothing to do with "alpha geek," a self-deprecating pun on alpha male.
• beta — an almost-ready version, shared with customers willing to report the bugs.

Alpha and beta are just Greek for a and b. They were, anyway, until 1994, when Netscape accidentally turned "beta" into a World Wide Web buzzword by giving away over a dozen beta versions of its browsers in three years. For Web hipsters, using Netscape's buggy beta features shifted from an option to a requirement. If you don't remember pounding your keyboard over Finnish sites that locked you out with "go install Netscape 2.0b3," you weren't really there.

Today, beta gets thrown around as a metaphor for "newer" rather than "not ready," applied to amorphous Web content and services rather than precisely numbered computer programs. It's confusing: Is Business 2.0 Beta really next month's print magazine, blogged for factchecking and typos by willing test readers? That'd be even ballsier than the issue they outsourced to India.

If you're not talking software, leave alpha and beta to the twinks who put "2.0" after any slightly changed version of anything. Instead, SVUG recommends these advanced metaphors:

• How's that business plan coming? "I can send you a pre-alpha if you promise not to laugh."
• Is your blog redesign live yet? "I think I've got a release candidate, wanna see?"
• Dude, you're writing for Valleywag 2.0! "Nah, it's more like Valleywag 1.1."

— Beth Gottfried

• Ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble may miss out on Burning Man, but he'll have fun visiting the Googleplex today with Googler Matt Cutts. Insert cruel "don't empty the snack room" line here, and send phonecam pics of Scoble to tips@valleywag.com. [Matt Cutts, photo by ~C4Chaos]
• Jason Calacanis tells everyone in the Internet industry, blog or die. Somewhere, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is pumping his fist and shouting "Yessss!" [Calacanis.com]
• RSS pioneer Dave Winer says an army of unnamed people are pissed at publisher Tim O'Reilly. (And it's totally not Winer's bitter recrimination for not getting an invite to last weekend's exclusive "Friends of O'Reilly" Camp, nor the two men's ongoing battle since 2000.) [Scripting.com]

This past weekend, whether you know it or not, dozens of Silicon Valley socialites camped out with tech publisher Tim O'Reilly in Sebastopol for this year's Foo Camp, cookin' up ideas and impressing eager reporters, same as every year.

But this year, the invite-only guest list seemed to stretch just far enough that half of the Valley's hip young techies found themselves asking, "If my friend got invited, why didn't I?"

Which brings us to the inevitable question:

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Photo by Niall Kennedy [NiallKennedy.com]

But from all but Blogger co-founder Evan Williams, Curt didn't get so much as a "screw you." Not all of the non-responders are worth millions, but one suspects they're all better off than the average Central African farmer.

Decent People
Evan Williams (Blogger, Odeo)

People Who Would Rather Buy a Fourth Lexus Than Give a Dime to Keep African AIDS Babies From Going Tits Up
Chris Anderson (Wired)
Ted Leonsis (AOL)
Steve Scott Johnson (Ookles, Feedster)
Craig Newmark (Craigslist)
Craig Mundie (Microsoft)
Esther Dyson (I have no idea)
Joi Ito (goes to lots of Blogger conferences, other than that...visits diaper hookers in Kabukicho?)
Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
Steve Wozniak (Apple)
Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media)
Kevin Kelly (Wired)
Jason Calacanis (Weblogsinc/AOL)
Nick Denton (Gawker)
James Hong (Hot or Not)
Max Levchin (Slide, Paypal)

The Blogswana Project [Official site]
Donation page [Blogswana Project]