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MINING FOR WEB 2.0 GOLD IN LOWERTOWN

Tech entrepreneurs to convene at MinneBar

Dan Grigsby got rich during the first dot-com mania a decade ago when he built a successful e-commerce startup called Merchant Planet in St. Paul's Lowertown.

He'll return to Lowertown today, but this time he'll be joined at a convention he helped organize by more than 300 programmers, Web developers and general all-purpose geeks who hope to strike it rich themselves. They want to get in on the Internet's second gold rush, dubbed "Web 2.0," that has been epitomized by Google, YouTube and MySpace.

Grigsby is one of the co-organizers of MinneBar, a sort of Woodstock for geeks. The convention features workshops like "Translating Geek: Executable Documentation" and the business-oriented "Marketing Your Technology Startup."

Grigsby is hoping events like MinneBar will draw together tech types who will launch their own enterprises by taking advantages of Web programming tools that didn't exist when he built Merchant Planet.

"I've spent all this time talking about this because, more than any place I've ever known, Minnesotans are a people of side-projects," he said. "Most every developer seems to have a pet project that could just about become a business."

- Leslie Brooks Suzukamo