CAMBRIDGE, MA — There's still hope, future. A full half of the people behind ROFLcon, the world's largest concentration of Internet-inspired pop-culture trends in one room, are female. Or, as they might put it, IRL LULZ 50% XX! As it's now officially impossible to host a tech-related conference without asking, Where are the women?, a "commenter" posed this to the morning's first all-guy panel. "Girls just have better things to do," answered Kyle "Paperclip to House Guy" MacDonald. Other possible explanations?

Ad:tech San Francisco is on and I'm disappointed. AdWeek's Brian Morrissey promised me Ad:tech would be full of "random, sketchy lead gen ad networks who hire booth babes." Instead, I'm stuck in a session with panelists explaining how Google could better sell search advertising for offline brand advertising campaigns, which sounds boringly profitable. And I've encountered precious little sleaziness yet. Except for one guy and his two friends from Blow4Free.com. And the 13 others I met, in photographs below. A warning: The last two pics are probably too hot for your office manager to handle.

ATLANTA, GA — The only unconference to open with a feminist pole-dance lesson, Sex 2.0 brought close to a hundred new-media sex nerds to Atlanta this weekend. The sessions dealt with how to get what you want on social dating sites, find people to swing with, and how to blog about your sexcapades while managing your reputation and privacy online. Daytime panels segued from theory to practice: strip clubs, sex parties and hookups. Here's what you can learn about sex from people who write about it for a living — especially the bits you'll never find field-tested in "sex" advice columns:

NEW YORK — I told a friend of mine at DoubleClick Google that I'm flying to San Francisco next week for Ad:tech. His response: "Hahahahahha. Have fun with that." Worried, I reached out to conference veteran and Adweek writer Brian Morrissey. His words were kindly reassuring. "It's very, very sales-y," he said.

Conference gnomes will need to choose sides. Blog moguls Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington have teamed up to schedule their TechCrunch50 show in September in direct competition to Chris Shipley's Demofall event. I've prepared a cheat sheet to follow the action at a distance.

Never believe a German when he tells you he can drink you under the table. Yesterday morning at the Open Source Business Conference at the Palace Hotel in SF, the appropriately named Conference Fonzerelli noticed the wunderbar German head of Sun-ified MySQL wasn't there in time for his first talk. Fortunately, it was a panel affair, and even the world's second space tourist landed in time to make it (Mark Shuttleworth). Marten Mickos, however, was evidently too hung over to make an appearance. You'd be hung over too, if you'd just landed in a country where your wallet's contents is increasing in value at a rate of 10 cents a minute!

PopTech, the only tech conference whose door I deign to darken, is looking for a part-time blogger to do about 15 hours a week of paid work for this year's event. Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe and former Pepsi/Apple chief John Sculley created the annual gathering, timed to October's peak autumn leaf season in Maine. It's like TED without the over-the-top zillionaire celebritard factor. It's not like SXSW at all. It'll make your mind hurt — in that good way.

For panel moderators, there's a cardinal rule: don't be boring. On the other hand, don't be too interesting, either. Yesterday at South By Southwest, the internet conference in Austin, Sarah Lacy of Business Week tried to liven up an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the painfully monosyllabic founder of Facebook. Her provocative interjections didn't elicit any great revelations from the social network pioneer. But they did irritate the audience of geeks who'd come to be bored by Zuckerberg rather that stimulated by his interrogator. This clip is the closest I've seen to an audience revolt.

Don't let our man Om Malik webcast to himself — tune in and watch a bunch of talking heads discuss the future of television live this afternoon. It's fun stuff: A browser in every TV! Because I want my TV to crash in the middle of The Unit so I can upload a problem report to Microsoft.

I've always heard Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had big cojones. No photographic proof, alas, has arrived at Valleywag yet. But this gigantic disco ball — so large it had to be transported by flatbed truck — for an event at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, which starts tomorrow, seems proof enough. To make room for Oracle's other outsized ambitions, San Francisco has closed off Howard Street through next Saturday. (Photo by Royce Perez)

"The problem with most conferences is we don't have enough to do," laments seminar veteran Dave Winer, who admits to Web surfing, emailing and instant-messaging during presentations. In Las Vegas today, speaker Mike Arrington from TechCrunch forgot to show up. [Update: Arrington says he never agreed to do the event.] Why bother? Instead of onstage pony shows and awkward demo booths, conference sponsors should just set up an open bar. Invite potential clients to come schmooze with a few paid celebs and Marc Canter (zzz at left). Think David Hornik's The Lobby for the rest of us. But first, make sure the Wi-Fi's rock solid.

This week, a bunch of bloggers are gathered somewhere to blog about blogs, blogging and bloggers. We forget the location — Vegas? or is it Beijing? — but topics will include blogs and politics, blogs and business, blogs and the media, and how to make some dough at this blog thing. Unless Dave Winer shows up and pisses everyone off by telling the truth again, we'll skip it.

Southern California's not the only area ablaze. Fires have broken out on the Big Island of Hawaii, near the Fairmont Orchid, and the hotel has evacuated its guests. And those guests include many attendees of VC David Hornik's exclusive funconference, The Lobby, who had extended their stay through the weekend. Such a bummer when your poolside-getaway boondoggle gets cut short by Mother Nature, isn't it?

When David Hornik pitched VCs and entrepreneurs on his tropical funconference, The Lobby, part of the sell was that the whole affair was to be off the record. Ha! Good one, David. Turns out what happens in Hawaii only stays there long enough to launch itself toward our inbox. Take for example, what struck some attendees as a budding romance between TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, the former Fox executive Michael Arrington hired to run his blog's business end, and Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. Now, TechCrunch runs on WordPress, so it's possible that Mullenweg was just giving Harde blogging tips. But witnesses to their late-night canoodling at the bar say that wasn't the kind of pointer in question.

Update:

The Lobby, David Hornik's Hawaii funconference, may have no agenda — but a lot is happening all the same. One delicious incident recounted to us: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who'd previously wooed BusinessWeek columnist and Valley fox Sarah Lacy onto his TechCrunch40 judges panel, apparently said something that made her throw a drink in his face. That's the first thing I've heard about The Lobby so far that actually made me wish I was there. Update: We hear the glass was empty. Okay, so make that two wishes: That we were there, and that Lacy wasn't so quick to sling back her booze.

Really, we're confounded. David Hornik's Lobby conference is ostensibly an invite-only affair. But some of the attendees had us scratching our head. Spotted, Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz, Brad Garlinghouse and Kiersten Hollars enjoying some sun instead of participating in Jerry Yang's 100-day turnaround of the company. Then there's Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham from Y Combinator. There's nary a 22-year-old wantrepreneur in sight, so what's the draw of this conference for them? Other inexplicables: Kara Swisher from AllThingsD, and TechCrunch heavyweight Michael Arrington, two notoriously gossipy hacks. Wasn't this event supposed to be off the record? And does Arrington even know what that means? (Photo by bradley23)

While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "stepped-up" LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman; FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, who's rolling in Googlebucks; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale; Evan Williams from Twitter; Mashery's Oren Michels; and
Kevin Rose (and his new haircut) from Digg with Joshua Schachter from the Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us. One question: Is this really Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg? I don't recognize him looking so unnerdly. (Photo by: bradley23)

The venture capitalists spotted at this week's Lobby conference in Hawaii are not, we've noted, the Sand Hill Road dwellers who inflated bubbles past or present. No sign of anyone from Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins. So who is enjoying the tropical sun? Well, conference host and August Capital partner David Hornik, of course. Also photographed on the scene: Greylock's David Sze, SoftTech's Jeff Clavier, Foundation Capital's Mike Brown, Panorama Capital's Mike Jung, and Bay Partner's Eric Chin. Hats off to First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman, who is using his entrepreneurial skills to cash in during the scavenger hunt. (Photo by: bradley23)