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…