Have you ever had an “Irish Coffee?” Did you know it’s not Irish at all? Well, it was invented in San Francisco. Ooopsss, turns out it was invented in Ireland but popularized by the bar in San Francisco.

So, when I heard that “Paddy’s Valley” (a group of Irish tech entrepreneurs) was coming to San Francisco I knew I HAD to take them to where the Irish Coffee was brought to America, Buena Vista.

Even better: you’re invited! 8 p.m. next Monday, December 3rd at the Buena Vista bar. Be there and be Irish. San Francisco style.

Oh, and wait until the Chinese come to town and learn that the Chinese Fortune Cookie was invented here too. 🙂

If you’re coming, please leave a comment here.

…who thought I belonged on this panel discussion tonight of smart media people who’ve done a lot more in their careers than me?

My prediction? There will be another new iPhone in 2008 and it will have a video camera and an open SDK.

Yeah, I’m not taking too many risks there am I? Heheh.

It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of predictions this panel, which includes journalists from BusinessWeek, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, makes. PodTech is filming it, so will have the video up in the next few days.

My other prediction? That I’ll be the stupidest one on this panel. I’ll try to keep up.

Last night I met Dan Pritchett, technical fellow at eBay. He told me that eBay alone has 21 identity systems.

So, if you wanted to use every part of eBay’s empire, like Skype, PayPal, StumbleUpon, etc, you’d need to sign in 21 different times.

Needless to say he, and others at eBay, are working on solving that problem.

Why did I meet up with Dan Pritchett? Because of a speech by Tim Berners Lee, the guy who invented the Web. No, Al Gore didn’t do that. Heh.

Anyway, we’ll have the videos of Tim’s talk up tomorrow. He’s thinking a lot about how to take the Web further and is working on Web research — but I’ll just let you read his blog to learn more about that. CNET has a report up of the talk he gave.

One thing I noticed is that during the talk he spent a lot of time talking about social behaviors of people. He’s clearly been studying the blog world and the social networking worlds and had a good answer to my question about what Facebook should look like in five years.

Another thing I noticed? It’s really great to be able to hear from smart people directly without having to go through intermediaries or filters anymore.

Anyway, back to the headline. How many identity systems and social networks do we need? How are we going to join them all together? I know I’m on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Upcoming, etc. etc. etc. — I wish they all talked with each other and all used the same sign on. Memorizing passwords is a real PITA.

Good luck to eBay and others in the efforts to join their systems together. That’s going to be some tough engineering (and political) work.

See ya tomorrow with the videos.