It's exactly 1,000 days until the start of the London Worldcon, assuming that we win the bid.

We have a lot of work to do between now and then, and we still have a bid to win, but we're already looking forward to seeing all of our members in London on August 14 2014.

We've updated our online list of supporters, and we now have over 500 Friends (including Young Friends). We believe that the previous record number of Friends for a Worldcon bid was the 335 Friends that the UK in 2005 bid had by the time of their site selection — we're now 50% over that number, with more than ten months still to sign up new Friends before our own site selection at Chicon 7.
 
For those who've not yet joined the rush to Friend us, or would like to upgrade from Pre-Supporting, there's still plenty of time to sign up and lock into our guaranteed best rates for joining the convention (assuming that the bid succeeds).

Congratulations to London in 2014 bid committee members Claire Brialey and James Bacon who have just won Hugo Awards at Renovation -- Claire for Best Fan Writer and James for Best Fanzine (The Drink Tank, also edited by Christopher J Garcia).

For some time now, there has been a proposal to link ExCeL (our proposed convention site) and the O2 (Europe's biggest music venue) with a cable car across the Thames. We've been a little skeptical about its prospects, but construction has now started, so it looks like it's actually going to happen. As well as giving great views up and down the river, this means that the 20 (or so) bars and restaurants at the O2 will be easily accessible from the ExCeL site by the time of the convention.

We're back from promoting the bid at the Eastercon, where we sold our 1,000th bid membership. Now let's go for 2,000 members by the time we get to Chicago in 2012.

We ran a membership desk throughout the convention, and the Guerilla Team ran an unofficial London in 2014 party. The party started at 10pm on Saturday night, and for six hours a continuous stream of con-goers enjoyed the hospitality and free booze. Many people joined and even took Friend memberships while dozens more promised to join -- and the Guerilla Team will hunt then down!

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We'd like to thank Google for increasing the user limit on our Google Apps account. We've been using Google Apps to help to co-ordinate the bid, but the free edition is limited to 50 users, and we'll have more staff than that by the end of the bid, and of course far more for the convention itself. They've now kindly given us more than enough users for us to continue to use Google Apps right through the convention.

If you want be able to nominate for this year's Hugo awards, you need to have joined Renovation, this year's Worldcon, by 31 January. Having done so, you'll then have until 26 March to send in your nominations. There will be a later deadline for Renovation membership to qualify you to vote in the final ballot.
 
Remember, you don't have to buy an attending membership and attend the convention in order to participate in the Hugos -- supporting members can also nominate and vote, and supporting membership costs US$50 instead of US$180.

We'll be joining two seated Worldcons, eight other Worldcon bids (three of which are hoaxes) and eighteen past Worldcons at the "All Worldcons, All the Time Bheer Tasting" at SFContario tonight. It starts at 10pm in room 309. We hope to see some of you there.
 
Many thanks to Geri Sullivan for organising the party and corralling all of the Worldcons and bids together.