The Blogher conference for and about women bloggers kicks off today in San Francisco and in honor of this important event, we decided to share some links to some of our favorite women bloggers here at RWW.

Gender is an important lens through which people communicate and that's still the case online. Below are links to some of our favorite women bloggers and some favorites from some web celebs you may or may not know. We hope you'll visit their sites and add more of your favorites in the comments.

ReadWriteWeb Favorites

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Many of my favorites were named by the people below, but a few unique ones include:

Anastasia Goodstein, founder of YPulse, a blog about marketing to youth that even non-marketers will enjoy reading.

Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs, my RSS mentor.

Orli Yakuel, Go2Web2.0, frequently finds web apps first.

Laurel Papworth, SilkCharm, a fabulous Australian social media consultant I've just recently discovered.

Photo: Orli Yakuel, by Yaniv Golan

Sarah Perez

RWW writer Sarah Perez says our own Corvida is her favorite woman blogger, but she's got a list of others she likes a lot as well.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, from Profy, a leading news blog about life online and promotion for the Profy blogging platform. Svetlana Gladkova, who writes on Profy.com as well as the Profy Development Blog is also one of Sarah's favorites.

Tamar Weinberg, Techipedia, is an internet marketing rock star and a repeat selection by several people asked to make a list for this post.

Veronica Belmont is a blogger and video blogger all over the internet.

Natalie Del Conte is a blogger and video blogger for CNet/CBS.

Gina Trapani leads the fabulous blog LifeHacker

Emily Chang writes and publishes all kinds of different sites, including PicoCool and eHub. Her design company created the most recent design for RWW.

Leah Culver is a founder of standards-happy microblogging platform Pownce.

Kara Swisher writes for All Things D and is one of the most powerful people on the web.

Sarah Lacy is a business writer, author and blogger focusing on tech.

Wow, what a list!

Photo: Sarah Lacy, by Brian Solis

Frederic Lardinois

RWW's Frederic Lardinois was a little late to the game, so many of his favorites were already taken by Sarah above (whose weren't?) - but here's a few folks he's adding to the list.

Susan Mernit used to work at Yahoo! Personals, is rumored to be working on a secret startup project and has lots to teach all of us about the social media space.

Xeni Jardin writes for weird-hunting blog BoingBoing and publishes media all around the world and web.

Lorelle VanFossen writes Lorelle on Wordpress, a leading source of education about using WordPress and about blogging in general.

Photo: Susan Mernit, by Brian Solis

Friends of ReadWriteWeb

Why stop at just our list? We asked a few other people to contribute. We hope you'll add your list of favorites in comments as well.

Matt Mullenweg is the creator of WordPress and another fan of Lorelle on Wordpress. He also named three other bloggers that were new to our list.

Kathy Sierra teaches people about usability and design. More than a year after a gender-based campaign of harassment led her to stop posting to her blog, Sierra remains a public speaker in high demand and one of many peoples' favorite bloggers.

danah boyd is an academic researching the culture of youth on social networks. If you've ever got some free time and want just one blog to read - hers is a good choice.

Tara Hunt is a marketing consultant and author. She blogs at Horse Pig Cow about how businesses can thrive in the changing online world.

Holly Ross

Holly Ross is the Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, NTEN. Her must-reads include:

Nancy Schwartz's Getting Attention, all about new media marketing for nonprofit organizations.

Michelle Martin's Bamboo Project is a blog about personal and proffesional development for knowledge workers.

Charlene Li is an outbound analyst at Forrester and co-author of Groundswell, a book and a blog about how big business can transform itself to engage in the social web.

Beth Kanter is a nonprofit tech consultant who has worked with nonprofit arts and community-based organizations for over twenty-five years. Words can't describe Beth's awesomeness.

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer is the CTO of Creative Commons, a global organization working to create alternatives to traditional copyright law. His favorite bloggers include:

Wendy Seltzer is a technology law blogger who writes about Intellectual Property Rights.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a blogger.

Michelle Thorne is a thinker, about free culture and a whole lot more.

Carolina Botero is a Colombian blogger who writes in Spanish about Free Culture and technology.

Curt Hopkins

Curt Hopkins is the founding editor of The Committee to Protect Bloggers, a blog and organization dedicated to protecting bloggers around the world from imprisonment, censorship and other offenses at the hand of authoritarian governments. Curt didn't hesitate for a moment before pointing us toward the following bloggers.

Esra'a Al Shafei is a 21 year old blogger from the Kingdom of Bahrain. She writes at Mideast Youth and at FreeKareem.org, a blog dedicated to agitating for the freedom of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman.

Israel-Canadian freelance writer Lisa Goldman writes about Israel and media.

Sokari Ekine is the founder of Black Looks, a blog about Africa, women in Africa and a whole host of other topics.

Who Are Your Favorites?

The blogs above are just a few of the many that are written by women leading public discussions about technology and many other topics online. Now that it's time for this year's Blogher conference, we'd love to take the opportunity to discover more excellent women who blogs. Who are your favorites?

I did it! I resisted the cravings all week. I did NOT buy an iPhone. It took a lot of deep Buddhist meditation to deal with my cravings. The iPhone is just gorgeous - this is user interface design at the highest level of art. Plus, the developer platform makes developers who dream in design patterns go all weak at the knees. The last time a UI and API induced equal cravings was in NeXt. No that is not a snide comment, Jobs learned from NeXt and this one is a big, big winner. But, oh yes there is a but, iPhone is still a piece of utility electronics.

When the sizzle ends, the steak still has to taste good. The iPhone has to be better than what people are currently using based on simple metrics of productivity. If the competition is Mac OSX vs Windows, it is no contest at all. Not only is OSX great eye candy, it also wins on productivity and the competition suffers from really annoying stuff like crashes, brownouts and other time-sinks.

But the competition here is not Microsoft. For the business user, the competition is Blackberry; and Blackberry is not Microsoft. I am a long time Blackberry user and it is seldom annoying. It just gets the job done. So unlike when I switched back from Windows to Mac, which I did with a big sigh of relief, I am in no hurry to switch based on anything wrong with what I have.

And a few reviews are making me think that iPhone could be a high maintenance date. Sure, high maintenance dates can be fun, but I am judging this on boring utility criteria. For example:

1. Keyboard. I am ready to be convinced by touch-screen keyboards. But I am not sure I want to spend the time adjusting. Outside the USA, where SMS is the major use of a mobile phone, I think this is a big deal. Flipping to horizontal is neat, but does this work for email?

2. Battery. Any mobile device that cannot do a full day's work and play without re-charge is a pain. You don't want to be in "don't leave home without it" mode regarding your charger unless you are going for more than a day. On a normal day, it's plug it in before you go to sleep and pick it up in the morning.

3. It's a bit big as a phone. OK, so is the Blackberry. But, as they say, size matters when you are holding it to your ear. Some people express almost comical amusement at the idea of using the iPhone as a phone - "you still call people, how quaint". Then don't call it a Phone, because it does set that expectation.

I know that resistance is futile. I will get an iPhone eventually. Or Blackberry will give me a better browser, which is really what I love about iPhone.

The killer app for me? Skype to Skype calls over WiFi. I believe that requires an unlocked iPhone. It would dramatically change the economics of mobile phones. Which AT&T certainly knows and will be resisting for as long as possible.

Plus a really slim but full function collapsible keyboard, so I can write full length stuff as easily as on my laptop. And then a simple way to plug into any screen that's around, so I can edit docs stored in the cloud. So that I can stop lugging around my laptop; that's a big win for people who spend a lot of time away from their desk.

My guess is that the iPhone ecosystem will bring all these things to market fairly soon. The iPhone is the first real new platform since Windows (sorry, Facebook).

Image: After the iPhone Keynote, Jan 2007; pic by mac steve

Evite, the social planning service which has been around since 1998, announced a partnership with JS-Kit today. Evite will use JS-Kit's commenting and polling features to allow organizers and guests to communicate with each other. Evite is also expanding the social networking features of its site, including the ability to share photos and stories after the event has taken place.

While a number of more Web 2.0 oriented invitation companies like Socializr, Renkoo, or Goovite have challenged Evite over the years, Evite has remained the de-facto mainstream standard for online party invitations. Evite currently has about 15 million unique visitors a month, a number that dwarfs that of any of its competitors.

Evite's biggest challengers are probably not even other invitation services, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace. However, given that Evite is geared towards a very mainstream market where email is still king and not everybody is on Facebook, that challenge only applies to a certain sub-set of users, especially college students. By refreshing its look and by adding more social networking features as well as photo sharing, however, Evite is doing quite a good job at staying fresh, even though the company has been around for ten years now. The question for Evite is going to be if its users are going to accept these changes, which are pretty far reaching and include not just the new features, but also an updated user interface and the ability to import photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube.

JS-Kit is clearly on a roll right now. After acquiring the commenting system provider HaloScan just a few weeks ago, this partnership with Evite gives JS-Kit access to a very large number of users. JS-Kit is currently deployed on more than half a million sites.

The Canada-based live-blogging tool CoverItLive added support for live video streaming to its application this week. Users covering live events can now add streaming video from Qik, Mogulus, and Ustream.tv to their live blogs. Bloggers can simply copy and paste the embed code from one of these services into CoverItLive. Adding video to live blogging takes it to a completely different level and will allow those who are covering these events to focus more on commentary and interacting with viewers than just reporting the events.

Conspicuously absent from the lineup of supported services are Stickam and Yahoo Live, both of which have a considerable amount of users.

Once you have added video to your live blog, users will see it at the top right of the application, but they can also pop it out and resize it. This is quite similar to how CoverItLive already handles YouTube videos, though the option to see videos in their own windows is new. One major advantage for bloggers here is that they can handle text and video all in one application.

CoverItLive provides writers with what they call a 'Writer Console,' which is quite different from what end-users see (see screenshot). The console is the main hub of the application and allows you to add polls, images, audio files, and now, live video. It also displays reader comments on the right side of the application.

One major advantage of CoverItLive is that it allows various writers and editors to work collaboratively, so that one person can handle the writing, another the video, and yet another blogger can focus on interacting with the audience.

Adding live video turns live blogging into a more interesting and immediate experience. Thanks to the proliferation of Qik on mobile phones, we will surely see more events being covered this way. We already liked CoverItLive a lot when we first reviewed it, though it did experience some outages when a lot of people used it during the January Macworld keynote. Since then, though, the platform has become a lot more stable.