My second guest-hosting gig at the Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast is now live.

Featuring Bobbie’s interview with Saul Griffith, Jemima and Charles’ trip to the Guardian Hackday and some emotionally-stirring nonsense with the Phoenix lander. Oh and me explaining how I have ‘nothing but contempt’ for the Guardian’s blog commentors. How to win friends and influence trolls.

Word…

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Hermione Way has just posted the highlights video from when Rob and I interviewed Sarah 2.0 on stage in a strip club. Here you go…

(The NYPD Blue camera work is particularly fitting, given the venue)

And then, of course, there was the after-party.

I feel like someone has Duck Taped a truck to a baseball bat and hit me in the liver with it, while simultaniously sucking my brain out through a curly straw. The last week or so has been mental.

For a start there was 24HoursInAmerica – liveblogging the US Election for 24 hours straight, with James Aylett and Sarah Bee. Despite the odd technological fuck up (including, at one point, James having a physical fight with an electronic safe until we realised it could be reset simply by turning it off and on again), it went rather well.

We exceeded our traffic expectations, thanks in large part to our partnership with The Register. We also had a number of exclusives including Bill O’Reilly’s next move, Pollcat’s spookily accurate predictions, calling for Saxby Chambliss before anyone else, the 24HIA demographic breakdown, groundbreaking puns and of course Russian bear attack!

I was also ridiculously pleased with this joke even if no one else was.

Then, less than two hours after the coverage wrapped up, Sarah 2.0 and Olivia – um – 1.0 rolled into town to promote the UK edition of Sarah’s splendid book, ‘The Stories of Facebook, Youtube and Myspace: The People, the Hype and the Deals Behind the Giants of Web 2.0‘. Yes, that’s the UK title – a string of words so ridiculous that they could easily be part of a McSweeney’s list (which, by the way, appear to have stopped being funny).

Tour guide duties for the trip had, by way of a complicated pitch process, fallen to Robert and me and we were determined to show Sarah and Olivia the most interesting aspects of the London tech scene. No surprise, then, that our first port of call was the Hampstead Tech Meetup in a house in North London. While Sarah talked Book, Robert and I busied ourselves arguing with Americans about whether Turkey was ready to join the EU. We also ate prawns in the Holly Bush and saw a hilarious pumpkin.

On Thursday, things really kicked off, with a dinner held in Sarah’s honour at Joe Allen’s, hosted by Rob and Paul Walsh.

I arrived just in time for the after-party at Paramount, at the top of Centrepoint. Highlight of the evening: a slightly terrified-but-amused looking Sarah wordering what she had to do to get the message across to one of the group who was a little, how you say, over-enamoured with ‘Smoking Sarah Lacy’ (copyright, Valleywag). Never have I heard the words ‘my husband’ forced into so many non-husband-related sentences.  Still, at least he wasn’t wearing a hat – Rob would have probably slapped him. That’s, after all, what hosts are for. 

Having ditched all but the hardest of the hardcore, the evening ended up back at the Sanderson with red wine and fries. Food of the Gods.

Friday – the main event – Rob and I interviewing Sarah on stage at a former strip club (epic venue win) about the ‘Secrets of Silicon Valley’. There’s video of the event coming soon from Newspepper but here’s a low-res trailer, courtesy of Zoe…

Despite the shaky camera work, I really think it gives a sense of Rob’s and my professionalism.

With our formal hosting duties at an end, it was time for some fun, and where better to find that fun than at Martha Lane-Fox’s karaoke bar with Sarah, Olivia, myself, Rob, Anna, Maggie, Simon, Scott, Hermoine, Michelle Dewberry and the rest of the gang.

The highlights are too numerous to mention but, even in the face of Sarah and Olivia’s bootylicious dancing to Sweet Home Alabama, we all agreed that the star of the evening was Simon Prockter with his extraordinary rendition of Blue Moon. 

Dangdagaganga da danga dang dang…. Blu blu blu blu bluuuuuu mooooon. 

And so to the weekend, and a trip to see the brontosaurus at the Natural History Museum. Sarah was very enthusiastic about the tail – “there’s the tail!” she screamed as we rounded the corner – but her enthusiasm turned to disappointment when she realised that the brontosaurus – A FREAKING BRONOTOSAURUS – wasn’t as tall as she’d have liked.

It’s a shame Michael Crichton’s dead; he could have rewritten Jurrassic park to include a Sarah character who, when faced with the snarling escaped T-rex could have simply yawned in its face, saying “You call those teeth? I guess I just thought they’d be sharper. I’m not angry, just a little disappointed…” 

To make up for that disappointment, we walked for eight miles to have some Proper English Tea and scones. There were far too many scones but just the right number of old people.

Sunday – and it was off to Judith’s house for a roast. What I hadn’t realised was that the subject of the roast would be me. No amount of wine could dull the pain of hearing our host telling stories about my – um – adventures among her friends. This, by the way, is the same Judith who introduces me to people with the warning “this is my friend Paul, he’s great. Don’t sleep with him.” Bless her heart.

Fortunately the food was delicious, as was the company – even those who, despite being able to win a game of Scrabble moments earlier, couldn’t quite cope with the mechanics of remaining upright on a chair. 

Monday brought one final professional (in the loosest sense of the word) task – guest hosting the Guardian Technology podcast with Sarah as special guest. I’ve never actually presented anything before, despite doing lots of guest radio appearences, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. I hate, hate HATE reading from a script  as it just makes me sound like I’m reading from – well – a script. See what I mean – the Podcast is below. Sarah was, of course, brilliant.

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Fucking professionals. 

(Also, see her blog for an exciting behind the scenes photo or my Flickr account for Olivia’s best facial expression of the day)

And now with Sarah and Oliva back in San Francisco without any serious physical injuries (too early to tell for the mental ones), it was time to catch up with everything I’d been neglecting for the last eight days, starting with my new weekly Guardian column. 

It’s called Not Safe For Work and, amazingly as I only filed it – late – a few hours ago, it’s just appeared online.  The column is about my strange adventures in technology so for this week’s subject… 

Who else?

Someone asked if I’d upload the video of me wearing my new monkey hat at the Digg drinks last week. Given that I’ve been too swamped today to write a proper blog post, I’m happy to oblige.

Qik video, as ever, by Zoe.

At this exact moment, I’m supposed to be on a boat, sailing around Turkey.

I’m supposed to be sipping cocktails on the top deck of a yacht, under the scorching Turkish sun while hot girls scamper around in bikinis and Robert, Simon, Scott and Tom try to keep their hands to themselves. 

And yet, and yet.

And yet, here I am in London – in a hotel room, writing a blog post, contemplating Leon for lunch and trying to juggle the four and a half million events that seem to be competing for space in my diary this week. I’m not entirely pleased by this turn of events.

And yet, and yet.

I intend to make the most of my enforced Londoness. There are not one but two excellent conferences in town – Virtual Worlds Forum and Future Of Web Apps, the former organised by Sasha Frieze, the latter by Ryan Carson at Carconogenic – or whatever he’s calling himself now. There seems to be a lot of the same people attending each event, despite the clear differences between the two…

- VWF was supposed to be held at SE1, where a man was shot in the face. FOWA will be held at Excel, and features a talk by Jason Calacanis. 

- FOWA’s first night will be marked by paid-for drinks with the Digg folks in Clerkenwell. VWF’s first night was marked with free drinks with (”The Internet’s”) Dave Green in Moorgate. (Dave thanked me for taking the heat off him these part couple of years. I’m flattered, but him totally disappearing from the scene has helped too.)

- VWF is a who’s-who of people involved in virtual worlds like Second Life, which I (co-)wrote a brilliant book about. FOWA is a who’s-who of rich and successful dot com entrepreneurs, who I wrote a book that people actually bought about. 

- FOWA is pronounceable as an acronym. Pronouncing VWF as an acronym makes you sound like you’ve just been shot in the lung. This may or may not have been intentional. 

But there are similarities too…

- Both have chosen venues that leave you sitting in the back of a cab asking “why the fuck are we going all the way to…?” Particularly FOWA which has chosen Docklands. Somehow flying all the way to San Francisco for Techcrunch 50 seems far less arduous than trying to work out how to get to E16.

- Both cost hundreds of pounds (millions of dollars) to attend and have forced me to resort to nefarious means to gain free entrance.

- Both will almost certainly see someone asking about halfway through, “fuck it, shall we go to the pub?”, where on arrival we’ll discover that everyone else interesting from the conference has had exactly the same idea. 

 After all, everyone knows that the pub is where the really important web 2.0 issues are discussed…

I’ve been up to so much for the past week or so that if I tried to cram it into a single post, it would read like an extra verse of We Didn’t Start The Fire.

I’m back from the US next week and I’ll tell you all about it then. I promise. Meantime, fortunately other people have been doing a great job of keeping track of me.

Here’s Valleywag’s coverage of Smack My Pitch Up and here’s Zoe’s Qik video of me at TC50, whoring myself…

And then there’s the murder…

And finally, the Techcrunch UK Butcher’s Bunch Podcast with me, Rob, Walshy, Scott and Butch having a fun chat for the last fifteen minutes.

Oh! No! I almost forgot – Lacy finally bothered her arse to review my book (which excitingly is now also available as an ebook from Waterstones.com.)

For those of you who couldn’t bring yourself to bring yourself to the party the other night, here’s a video from Zoe to give you a taste of what you missed.

I’m going to write a proper post about this later – my first time in a TV studio (I was a talking head for Newsround once, years ago, but they came to me) – but meantime, here’s the video of my very brief Sky News appearance last night…

It’s on the Sky News Blog too.

“Being the first ‘Rong’s’ event, the party promised to be a hell of a night. The sort of night that, had Caligula been hosting a networking event downstairs, he’d have probably come up to ask us to keep it down a bit because we were frightening the horses. Needless to say, I was looking forward to it immensely.”

Robert Loch – serial entrepreneur, uber-networker, decadent event organiser and now in-pub-on-site interviewee.

We met up in Soho’s Dog and Duck pub for a chat over some Sam Smith’s beer to discuss matters of great importance.

Matters like his latest venture, his world famous party flat and hot tub, his passionate love for Channel 4 News tech correspondent Benjamin Cohen and – most importantly of all – just exactly how much of a twat he thinks I am.

And exactly how much of a twat is that? Click the play button below and all will be revealed.

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