Clay and I are sitting at SFO domestic–the Alaskan flight is delayed an hour and a half–and fortunately we’ve found a free wifi hotspot. God knows whose it is, but we’re grateful.

Next stop on the “summer of love West Coast blogging conference circuit” is Gnomedex up in Seattle. I’ve never been to the home of Microsoft, so I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like. Not that we’ll be anywhere near Bill’s place.

I had the chance to say hi to Chris Pirillo at BloggerCon, and he seems like a really nice genuine guy. So I’m looking forward to the event, and perhaps another quick chat with the man and Ponzi.

So far I’ve networked a lot, shown a few people the Web2Thing concept, and had some great feedback. It’s suprising, but I’m even more excited about launching than previously, and that’s saying something given how eager I’ve been for months.

I also stumbled across a great name for the service, and the domain was available. Finally, we think we’ve got our real name–more on that in the future.

We had dinner with the BloggerCon crowd last night. It was great fun and we got to chat some amazing people, like Buzz Bruggeman.

This morning we’re sitting in the second day of BloggerCon, and Clay and I have established that it’s much more relaxing than SuperNova. Different purpose, and of course a different people, and much more conversations. The later making it a heap more useful so far.

Don’t get me wrong, SuperNova was great for networking, and there are just some unreal people there, but the sessions focused more on the corporate space, and the new web has accelerated beyond them. BloggerCon people are all in the slip stream, creating it in fact, so they don’t have to rehash what we all know.

The current session is a little empty, but I guess that’s to be expected. It is only just past 9am on a Saturday morning.

For an entrepreneur in Perth Australia it’s a big deal to take a trip to the US for two weeks as part of launching a startup. It costs A LOT, and given the 24 hour travel time the jet lag can make you a mess.

So the question is what value is there making a trip to several conferences for someone who is still operating in stealth mode.

Fortunately I had one major goal: finding potential advisors. So I’ve chatted with a few people over here with that in mind, and have been happy with the result so far.

It certainly isn’t the content of the conference. Although there has been some interesting topics, many of them only scratch the surface. It’ll be interesting to contrast Supernova 2006 with a couple of un-conferences in the next couple of days (Bloggercon and Barcamp).

The backchannel at Supernova has been fun, and also a nice little way of networking and introducing myself. Of course the hallway sessions have been the most valuable, and I’ve been able to meet and chat with some cool people.

It seems like I’ve been here so long, but in reality it’s only been two days of sessions. So, I’ll have much more to report next week.

At the end of 2005, while enjoying a beer and pizza at Little Creatures in Fremantle, Graeme and I were having one of our regular conversations that dug into everything tech . There’s always something wonderful about the atmosphere pre-summer, and the only real way to enjoy it is with a brew.

I can remember sitting at the table chatting about a particular problem that both of us had encountered on the Internet, and slowly a concept evolved. After a few weeks of banter we decided that the concept was compelling enough to bootstrap, and we’ve been working on it since.

I sure didn’t realize how hard, and long, the process of deciding on a name for an Internet business is: domain name availability, trademarks, clarity, and meaning, making for a tough exercise. So to facilitate opening the communication channel slightly, we’ve pre-named it Web2Thing, and launched this weblog.

This weekend Graeme is at @media Social and geek dinner, and next week I’m boarding a plane for Supernova and Gnomedex. We’re hoping to have a chat with a few people about Web2Thing, show them our alpha demo, and begin the hunt for an advisory board.

In the mean time we intend to discuss the process of launching Web2Thing–which eventually will have that meaningful name–on this weblog. So, please stay tuned by returning to the blog, or subscribe to our feed.