As the story goes, someone was joking that O’Reilly should have a literal “foo bar” (see metasyntactic variable if you don’t get the joke) and invite movers and shakers in technology over for drinks. Thus FOO Camp was born, with FOO later becoming a backronym for “friends of O’Reilly.” Gee, all we need now is a Web 2.0 Drinking Game!

So who are the tech superstars here that I know? (By “know” I mean “recognize”.)

The Bloglines guy. The Amazon guy. The del.icio.us guy. The Wikipedia guy. The Perl guy. The Atom guys. The Python guy. The Flickr folks. The Firefox folks. The Adaptive Path folks. The Smart Mobs guy. The We the Media guy. The Hackers and Crypto guy. The Yahoo guy. The Greasemonkey guy. The Technorati guys. The wiki guy. The BitTorrent guy. The Blogger and Odeo guy.

It’s kind of like OSCON, but with drinking during the conference and camping after. I hung out with the Knoppix Hacks guy (and friend), as well as some other O’Reilly folks. We played with a homemade Segway and drooled over the SUV of Segways that the Make magazine guy had brought.

After a while it was late, I was tired, and I was not going to be spending the night in a tent because I have a bed in Santa Rosa. Though I admit they looked pretty cool under the moonlight and fog in the orchard behind O’Reilly Media.

Tomorrow I have a Beer Revival to attend, with a slim chance I’ll make it back in the AM to listen to some of the morning talks.