Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. He’s best known for being the guy who created the website you’re reading right now. He lives in San Francisco, does lots of public speaking, and helps make cool things like You Look Nice Today, Back to Work, and Kung Fu Grippe. Also? He’s writing this book, he lives with this face, he suffers from this hair, he answers these questions, and he’s had this life. So far.

Merlin’s favorite thing he’s written in the past few years is an essay entitled, “Cranking.”

Ryan Norbauer is an armchair web application philosopher, madcap productivity theorist without portfolio, and entrepreneurial dilettante.

He is founder of the widely praised gay dating community Lovetastic.com, President of Norbauer Inc Consulting (which specializes in Ruby on Rails development,) and purveyor of fine über-nerdy t-shirts. He writes about productivity and whatnot here and programming here.

Norbauer has a multifarious past as a writer and researcher, having worked at the British Parliament, NASA, the CDC, and even a psychiatric hospital (among other things.)

Matt Wood is a writer, former IT drone, sometime realtor, and full-time stay-at-home dad. He and his family live in Chicago.

Neil is a nerd hailing from Canada who rarely ever posts to his personal site - a fact that fills him with uncharacteristic sullen moodiness. He spends his days twirling macs, cats, web sites, and one stupendously cute baby boy above his head while enjoying good, strong cups of coffee.

Brian Oberkirch lives on the Gulf Coast & thinks about writing, food and the Web quite often.

grant lives in a palatial suburban estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, surrounded by chickens, dogs, cats, children and semi-animate piles of clutter. Older, irregular writings on various topics can be found at Flying Fists, although lately he spends more time trying to get people to join him recording songs of discovery (and reading the latest weird science headlines) at The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

He is an Aquarius, a vayu/kapha body type with a tendency to stagnant liver heat, and remembers when the internet was just a bunch of UFO enthusiasts and HAM radio nuts dialing up to local BBSes to post on something called FIDOnet.

His day job is writing about unexplained phenomena for Sun, a magazine that has yet to catch up with FIDOnet's amazing technological breakthrough, but can be found on dead trees in supermarkets nationwide.

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p> Emory lives in Providence, RI and works as an information security engineer and researcher, and also writes about mobile technology for fine publishers such as O'Reilly and O'Grady's PowerPage.

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p> His hobbies include Aikido, backgammon, motor scooters, chronic anxiety and World of Warcraft.

I make stuff like MetaFilter all day long.

Chanpory helms LifeClever, a blog about design, productivity, and "life hacks." During the day, he's an interaction designer for Dubberly Design Office in San Francisco.

He's also pushed pixels for MetaDesign, MoveDesign, Youth Radio, and McShane Adigard Design (MAD). When not feeling modest, he likes to brag about his interaction and branding work for Macworld, PC World, Symantec, Adobe, Yahoo!, and Four Seasons Hotel.

Left to his own devices, Mike Monteiro will destroy himself faster than you could ever hope to do the job. He is currently working on a list of things that are wrong.

That Derrick Bostrom is considered productive probably says more about the quality of his acquaintances than anything else. When he's not frantically rushing toward his next scheduled hard stop, Bostrom can be found wasting time at his twin blogs, Bostworld and Meat Puppets.

Joel is working on creating a life that will be remembered by dirty men proclaiming "Now there was a steel-driving man." But without actually getting dirty himself. <br/> He writes online, as well as in magazines, which in turn are put online.

Ian Beck is a web designer and writer, and is responsible for Tagamac, a blog dedicated to practicing tagging kung-fu under Mac OS X. He sporadically publishes other random junk online, as well.

Gordon Meyer is a Chicago-based author of dozens of software manuals, an expert in "do it yourself" home automation (he wrote Smart Home Hacks for O'Reilly Media), and an experienced public speaker. His interests include conjuring, sociology, and humanizing technology.

Lance has been living on the web since 1996, habitating places like glassdog.com (still there), soulflare.com (gone and forgotten) and laconcon.com (hanging about, well past sell-by date). He works as a freelance web demi-god helping other people figure it all out, and lives with his cat, Paris, in San Francisco (rather than the other way around).

Greg Knauss has been writing on the Internet since 1989, which means, yes, nobody will pay him for it.

Margaret Mason is author of No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. She publishes the shopping blogs Mighty Junior and Mighty Goods, which was one of Time Magazine's Top 50 Cool Sites of the Year. Her personal site Mighty Girl has been awesome since 2000.

Makes digital stuff.

Ben Brown is the creator of do.Oh, a todo list application for the Web and iPhone. He lives in San Francisco, but dreams in Austin, TX. His advice to Merlin is to make the profile pictures on 43Folders bigger.

I'm the head of technology at a major record label, but that only means I like music and technology. I try not to be evil. Often.