Glasshouse at Soho House: Cocktail Chatter

We hadn't been to Glasshouse NY's monthly events before last night, but had a sense that it was a networking/cocktail party with a speaker or two thrown in for gravitas. We were right! The crowd at the Soho House was heavy on media and startup types, who chatted ferociously, then listened respectfully to Technorati chairman Peter Hirshberg and There.com CEO Michael Wilson opine about social networking. Then they resumed ferocious chatting.

Peter and Michael, guided by Fortune-by-way-of-BusinessWeek writer Jessi Hempel, gave a brief overview of Internet/media trends that won't surprise any of our readers, but might be useful for a general audience. Peter barely touched on the news that Technorati had just redesigned its home page to feature a "river-of-news" presentation, which is causing a stir today. During Q&A, MTV's Fred Graver cheefully lobbed a bomb: "At some point you have all of these people talking to each other. Where's the money?" he asked -- and didn't get much of an answer. More bold-faced names after the jump.

blip.tv cofounder Dina Kaplan asked us to stop beating up her company, which we sort of had anyway, while NewsMarket CEO Shoba Purushothaman was unaware that we'd snarked about her business. We then felt extra-stupid when we realized that NewsMarket's job is to help corporations distribute b-roll, not to entertain bored bloggers. Sorry!

Inc magazine Executive Editor Mike Hofman told us he believed that his owner, Joe Mansueto, was somewhat interested in buying Business 2.0 from Time Warner, but that the sellers wanted unreasonable terms. Douglas Atkin, chief community officer for Meetup, told us people had complained that his boss Scott Heiferman had acted like a "martinet" at the last NY Tech event. We agreed, but approvingly.

GlassHouse founder Judith Clegg confided that she'd overbooked the Soho house by about 2x, -- they had room for 85 and had rsvp's for about 160 -- but said they'd have a bigger room next time. We heard that Webby awards organizer Neil Vogel was there, but didn't get a chance to make our case to him. And we spied College Humor's Ricky van Veen and Zach Klein, but didn't talk to either. If we had talked to Zach, we would have congratulated him on his announcement, via his blog, that he was leaving the company to design a prefab house, among other pursuits. And we would have asked why he was wearing a name tag that identified him as a Vimeo employee.* Crazy kids!

* Had we asked, or done a cursory Google search, we would have discovered that Zach helped found Vimeo. And that like College Humor, Vimeo is a Connected Ventures property. Lazy bloggers!