On Saturday, 30 July, I attended the BlogHer confab in Santa Clara.
I missed the morning sessions and got there in time to have lunch during the Flame, Blame and Shame panel. Favorite moment? When Mena Trott (co-founder of SixApart with her husband), sitting in the audience at a table very near me, never got a chance to respond to an implicit criticism of Movable Type. The scene went kinda like this: The panel turned, as these blog discussions often do, to the issue of spam. A complaint from audience member Heather of News.com regarding the enormous amount of spam comments she gets every day (about 300) inspired commentary from the audience moderator --"Is Mena here?" she asked -- that she was moving to Drupal because of how well it deals with spam. And she went on. Many eyes were on Mena- was she going to get a chance to respond? She did not. And I, like her pals at the table, rolled our eyes when the panel moved on and she never got that chance. She got flamed!
And just like another panel member mentioned earlier, women, unlike men, flame softly.
Oh by the way, the soon to be released v3.2 of Movable Type has much enhanced spam fighting capabilities, according to what I've been hearing.
(Note-I'm writing this from work and don't have my conference notebook in front of me. Apologies to those of you I've referred to anonymously. Stay tuned for more.)