'We the Media' book party

One of the great things about living in the Bay Area is that it remains ground zero for cutting-edge technologies and social movements, including the personal media revolution (sorry, New York, but you'll catch up). Tonight I attended Dan Gillmor's official book release party for We the Media. (That's Dan in a photo I took one week ago at BlogOn.)

I hope to blog my review of the book sometime in the next week or two. One of the surreal things tonight was reading the book on BART during my train ride into the city -- and then seeing or meeting several of the people Dan wrote about, such as Phil Gomes and Dave Sifry (just back from his stint at CNN during the convention ... more on that in a few days).

But the co-star of the evening was the spanking new Creative Commons
headquarters (in the SOMA district of San Francisco, a half block from where I worked at Microsoft Sidewalk for two years). It's an amazing new space, subsidized by the generosity of Mitch Kapor.

Turning out for the fete were (among scores of others): Larry Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Glenn Otis Brown, Tim O'Reilly, Marc Canter, Fred von Lohmann and Cindy Cohn of EFF, Derek Slater of Berkman fame, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Craig Newmark, Ev Williams, Gary Rivlin, Brian Dear, Scott Rosenberg, Gordon Mohr, and a number of other tech luminaries I didn't get a chance to meet.

Dan tells me there'll be another such gathering in the East Bay.

Congrats, Dan, on a terrific book and on your dedication to the cause of participatory journalism.