Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it's a French web 2.0 conference!

Bon soir from Paris. It's 3am on Wednesday morning and I've just stumbled back to my hotel from a MySpace-sponsored party at Palais Maillot and an after-party in a bizarre dive bar where water dripped from the ceiling and the DJ played nothing but Jive Bunny.

I'm in town for LeWeb, Europe's largest web 2.0 conference, with 1,800 entrepreneurs from around the world each paying €1,500 to meet their peers, demo their startups and generally try to pretend that their businesses aren't completely and totally doomed. The conference ends in a little over 12 hours which, annoyingly, is about five hours after this column is due to be published.

I shouldn't necessarily be surprised at the deadline inconvenience. Previous LeWebs have been marred by controversy and negative press coverage so this year organiser Loic Le Meur has come up with a cunning plan to head off criticism. In short, he's doing everything he can to ensure that no press commentary whatsoever escapes from the conference hall.

It's a strategy of three planks. Plank one is to have absolutely no wireless internet access in the conference venue for most of the first day. Not in the main hall, not in the press room and not even in the theatre where startups were invited to pitch to a panel of judges. Instead, with almost no time to rework their presentations, the already screwed entrepreneurs were told they'd have to demonstrate their internet businesses without using the internet. That's right — LeWeb was entirely without the web. Which I suppose makes it simply "Le".

But still Loic wasn't taking any chances. Just in case anyone managed to smuggle in their own internet connection, perhaps hidden inside their phone or their sock, plank two was to arrange for the heating to be turned down so low that all those in attendance were forced to wear not one but two pairs of thick mittens. Removing them to so much as Twitter a negative comment would surely mean the loss of a finger or two to frostbite.

Finally, as his plank de grace against against even the most dedicated journalist or blogger, Loic carefully selected the least newsworthy speakers ever to have appeared on a conference programme. Then he made most of them take part in "fireside chats" that were so rambling and unfocused in a stereotypically French style that I kept hoping that the ghost of Charles Bukowski would float drunkenly on to disrupt them. Day one's keynote firesider was Paulo Coelho — the favourite author of that girl you met on the first day of university who spent her gap year in Thailand and like totally found herself. "Everyone has something interesting to say," Coelho said at one point, clearly showing that he's never had a conversation with one of his fans.

Final score at the end of day one: Loic — 3, newsgatherers — 0.

All of this, of course, thrilled the American attendees. If any of them was any doubt about Silicon Valley's tech supremacy over Europe, they only had to spend five minutes in that freezing hall, with its nonexistent Wi-Fi and and its cloakroom sign that read "Cloackroom" and all was right with their world view. 1938 Media's Loren Feldman Twittered to ask "how hard is it to run some cables or do whatever it is the fuck they do to bring me the internet?" — and even Americans who had been invited to participate couldn't resist a dig. BoomTown blogger Kara Swisher used the platform to encourage attendees to relocate to California "where we have warm sun and the internet" while Techcrunch's Michael Arrington threatened to send his writers home early given that they couldn't actually file any reports. Meantime, in the startup competition room, Robert Scoble sat at the judges' table openly playing Solitare while yet another poor entrepreneur stumbled through his webless pitch.

Fed up (but relieved I'd blagged my way in rather than paying to attend like so many other poor saps), I skipped out to the car park where a Finnish startup had had the remarkable foresight to install a functioning sauna. I found it packed to its pine rafters with Brits, getting slowly drunk on licorice vodka and gleefully bitching about how disappointing everything was. "The speakers were dull, it's bloody freezing and I can't even blog about it," said one, which pretty much summed it up. Although I would have given the goodie bags a mention as well: they contained branded bandannas. Bandannas! Mon dieu!

But I'm not being entirely fair to LeWeb. Not all of the speakers were dull (some were just batshit weird) and of course my deadline means that I can only tell half the story. There's a slim but existent chance that tomorrow will be a huge improvement. Maybe the internet will have turned up. Maybe there'll be branded hot water bottles. Certainly the speakers look much better. There's Marissa Mayer from Google, Chris Anderson from TED, Dr. Werner Vogels from Amazon and — gasp — a surprise guest who, please God, won't turn out to be Nicholas Sarkozy again. (Although if he does come, can someone make sure Carla Bruni knows that the real action is in the sauna?) And yet, even if today's speakers are better, the yanks can still claim — quite reasonably — that the improvement was only because so many of the second day's speakers are American, including the organisers of two far better American conferences: TED and Techcrunch 50. It's lose-lose for Loic and, by extension, it's lose-lose for Europe.

And so, once again, it falls to me to save the day; to salvage our entire continent's reputation in the eyes of the world. It's a hell of a job but, as luck would have it, I have a hell of a plan to pull it off.

Earlier this week, just before the start of LeWeb, Lord Drayson, Britain's Minister for Science and Innovation, announced plans for a £1billion investment fund to support technology startups in the UK over the next few years. The plan was initially greeted with excitement by those startups, but already British cynicism has kicked in and questions are now being asked about how exactly the money will be divided up. Fortunately, my plan takes care of that too. I'm all about 360-degree thinking.

A few hours ago I sent an email to Lord Drayson applying for all of the money. Every single penny of the one billion pounds. And when it arrives, I intend to spend it all organising the most earth-shatteringly brilliant two-day conference Europe — and the world — has ever seen. Unlike LeWeb, there will be no panels, no "fireside chats", no goody bags, no live webcasting and absolutly no keynote speakers. Instead I'll blow the entire budget by constructing a gigantic sauna, right in the middle of London (easier for me to get to, and a beer won't cost nine euros a bottle) and surrounded by a moat of liquorice vodka. Each attendee will have a big, fat pipe of internet all to themselves and — of course — the whole thing will be completely free, including transport and accommodation. Every entrepreneur in Europe will be invited, and encouraged to bring a long straw.

It may sound ambitious — reckless even — but my logic is faultless. No one really comes to technology conferences for the speakers; the real networking and business is done in corridors and during the after-hours drinking. And it's almost impossible not to network when you're crammed into a giant sauna with ten thousand entrepreneurs, investors and industry journalists, wasted on liquorice vodka. A ton of business will get done, a thousand partnerships will be made and after two days everyone will go home hungover, happy and filled with enough morale to easily ride out the recession.

And even more satisfying than all of that is the fact that the idea of a huge state-sponsored piss-up is such an anathema to Americans that there's no way they can outdo us. Instead Kara, Michael and all those other smug Valley dwellers will be forced to look on enviously as Europe drinks, sweats, networks and bonds its way to a new dot com boom.

Take that, American organisational superiority! And viva la revolution!

Paul Carr is author of Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore. Having finally bought the domain name from a man in Korea, he now blogs at paulcarr.com