Today I once again emerged from my shell and ventured into Jerusalem, this time for breakfast with Jeff Pulver and around 80 of his friends. I have to get accustomed to this idea of being with actual live people, but I think I could grow to like it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with these events (I wasn’t until today) you’ll find this video interesting:

Jeff is a multi-faceted guy with an impressive resume and an engaging style. He’s been hosting these breakfasts for a year or so; this morning’s was the first in Jerusalem, although there have been a few in Tel Aviv. All in all he’s done 35 of them in 18 different cities.

I got to reconnect with some of the people I met at the Jerusalem Web Professionals meeting last week, which was nice … it’s much easier to go into these events knowing a few friendly faces. So, it was good to see Charlie Kalech, Kim Mayroze, Shimshon Young, and Debi Zylbermann again.

Some other attendees included Brian Blum of This Normal Life and his wife Jody Blum, a financial coach; Yehudit Singer, the editor of IsraTimes; Joel Katz of Religion & State in Israel; Robin Zalben from Spielberg Film Archive; and Bernie DeKoven, the Fun Maven.

The tools that Jeff describes in his video … The Personal Social Networking Toolkit, as he has dubbed it … is what makes this event stand out from others I’ve attended. For me at least the tag labels were awkward. Particularly when talking to women I was a little shy about applying labels to someone’s chest, so those were a bust. But the personal tag line is a marvelous conversational ice breaker, and there were some very creative ones to be seen. (I never did get the chance to ask Jody Blum about soup, but I found the tag line intriguing nonetheless!)

I had a great time at Jerusalem’s first Breakfast with Jeff Pulver, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the next one.