Charlene Li and Halley Suitt, moderated by Lisa Stone, led the discussion in the first panel -- but there were a ton of great comments from the floor. Here is a good subset surrounding how relevant the old guard link counters (Technorati, Icerocket, e.g.) are to what we want to do.

Charlene Li: you gotta network. A-list is important. [more in her own words]

Halley Suitt: but... blogging is about breaking the rules. But still -- you need to ask people to link to you. [more in her own words]

Lisa Stone: but some people get offended when you ask.
HS: Who cares?
HS: If I blow it, just ask me again.

CL: Network, be relevant, be unique. Have your own A-list.

HS: Don't compromise your vision of what blogging can be based on what you think will get you on the A-list or Technorati 100

Audience: Do we need to be validated by Technorati? No. We are our own validation. Let's create our own critera.

 

    ME: We're all talking about how to get more links. What about committing to all GIVING more links??
    
    
danah: Women form dense networks, men tend to spread out the network and have more weak ties. You need to understand the way the tools work to reflect this. [in her words]
Lisa Stone: So, we need new code.

audience: don't just try and get more traffic. have a goal. what do you want to comunicate?

audience: we became a source by talking about an issue that needed to be talked about. be a source on what you care about, not just a source overall.

audience: who cares about the technorati 100? it's only one metric. get it out of your head.

audience: I don't find a lot of individual voices on the Technorati 100 -- just companies

Jan Kabili: I look at what the guys are doing, and adapt it for my purposes. Joined a network -- let's make a network for women bloggers.

Koan Bremner: I have no confidence that Technorati actually works. Case: 3 weeks ago we adopted a group tag to designate Blogher-related posts. My posts never showed up on Technorati... [more in her words / photo]

Nile Kennedy of Technorati: We don't remove any tags. Posts may get removed from DMCA. Censorship doesn't happen.

audience: technorati_sucks is a tag, technoratisucks is not.

Lisa Stone: Technorati reliability is an issue.

Lisa Stone: Let's hear some concrete ideas.

Mary Hodder: Technorati scrapes the front of your blog, including blogrolls. There's a legacy effect from first generation blogrolling. Let's come up with a community algorithm that the link-counting companies could incorporate (Feedster, Icerocket, Technorati, etc.)... to express conversation in ways better than inbound links. Inbound links is a throwback to old media, counting eyeballs on the page. We need algorithms with more than one metric: how many times people link out, how many times people comment, etc. I want help with this -- will post it on my blog (Napsterization).

Mir (flink): I made a choice to NOT network with certain people, because I don't like them. Why should I network with them if I don't believe in what they're doing?

Lisa Stone: Keep up the honest discourse/disagreement.

Marian (coming out colored): I write about Africa, Asia, the Americas -- I work in several languages. The political issues we're talking about generally are very US-centric, very Washington-centric. How do we bridge being online with all the people not online.

Mena Trott: LiveJournal 72% women, 72% under 21. MovableType/TypePad are about 50/50. We see women using our tools in very interesting ways, not just politics. There are women in high positions in social software (me, Caterina Fake, Meg Hourihan), get thrown out as tokens. We don't have any female engineers, but almost all of our tech support who know these tools are women. I'm not writing about these women in our company, and I get criticized for it -- because I'm too involved in building the business. Shelley Powers always criticizes me for this -- let's not be too critical of the women who are actually doing it.

Technorati: yes, we will hear your ideas and we have an open APIs for you to build upon what we're doing.

Marc Canter: if you don't like what we're doing, start your own company and do whatever you need to do. Use the open APIs. Start a BlogHer 100.

Amber: numbers of links in and the traffic you get are not necessarily hand in hand.