Last week, I went to the 15th Stanford Accel Symposium, hosted by Stanford University’s MediaX and the VC firm Accel Partners.

With the honking big title of “The Delta Conference: The Impact of 2008 Dramatic Events on the World of Digital Media and Technology,” it was not quite that dramatic.

But there were a few nuggets to be found at the event, including a panel on online media with a stellar gang, all talking about microblogging, content and where it is all going in this horrible econalypse.

It was kind of like “The View,” except all guys in khakis and oxford shirts. You know, a typical Silicon Valley gathering.

BoomTown did video interviews with all the panelists about their takeaways from the chat: CBS (CBS) Interactive top terrier Quincy Smith, former Yahoo (YHOO) and now LinkedIn bigwig Jeff Weiner, former Yahoo and now Microsoft (MSFT) bigwig Scott Moore, former exec at Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL and now entrepreneur Jim Bankoff, and Federated Media head John Battelle.

Here’s the video:

The large round by Oak, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blog site a valuation of just “south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” said Harman (pictured here), in an interview with BoomTown. “And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

Indeed, the Huffington Post–which is now billing itself as ‘”The Internet Newspaper”–has been hitting on all cylinders during the current election season.

And it hopes to continue building that momentum into the Obama administration, which will give the liberal-leaning site a lot of advantages in coverage.

The Huffington Post has also become a powerful news aggregator, much as the more conservative Drudge Report has, sending traffic all over the Web from its site by linking with a variety of online sites. It also has a strong offering of high-profile bloggers.

But the site’s leaders are also hoping its traffic strength will allow it to be as strong in arenas outside of its flagship political arena, including in business, local, “green” and investigative news.

It will also use the money to make acquisitions, the company said in a press release about the funding, which it put out this morning.

It’s certainly a long way from May of 2005, when its high-profile co-founder, Arianna Huffington, was roundly mocked for launching the site. Today, she has seen her power grow as the site’s traffic and influence have.

The site’s namesake operates out of her California-based office in Los Angeles, while the company has its HQ in New York.

The Huffington Post’s traffic in September 2008, for example, quadrupled from a year before to 4.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore (SCOR). That performance made it the No. 1 “stand-alone political blog and news site,” besting Drudge.

“The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online,” said Harman, who will join the Huffington Post’s board. “The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways…and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.”

But, like a lot of advertising-reliant businesses, the Huffington Post is also facing a tough market and must show it can compete under more dire economic circumstances and build a sustained and profitable business.

This slug of money should give it a lot of room to do so, said Harman, who has invested in several digital media companies, such as Demand Media and Federated Media. He was also one of the lead investors in aQuantive, the digital advertising business that was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.

“Who knows how deep this economic situation is going to be,” said Harman, who noted that he and others kept investing in aQuantive through the last Web downturn. “But strong companies that keep investing through a bad cycle can emerge as winners.”

Previous investments in the Huffington Post have totaled about $12 million. That funding has come from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as seed money from co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

Funding reports about the Huffington Post appeared about a week ago in the Times of London, with the post claiming a $15 million investment and expansion into investigative and local news.

But the most detailed posts were done by paidContent, which was the first to name Oak as the new investor and said the round was $20 million.

Yesterday, BoomTown had a much-belated lunch with longtime tech editor and writer Harry McCracken to catch up on how life has been going since he started his own tech blog site, Technologizer, this past summer.

The former editor-in-chief of PC World got a lot of attention in 2007, after he stood his ground over editorial meddling by former CEO Colin Crawford, who tried to kill a “Ten Things We Hate About Apple” story.

McCracken quit, but was soon back on the job at the IDG unit, with Crawford kicked upstairs to corporate.

But, within a year, McCracken had left again, this time to strike out on his own at his Technologizer site, which is owned and operated by him (and using Federated Media to sell ads). It covers a wide range of tech topics, from PCs to smartphones to the future of cloud computing.

I like the tone of Technologizer, which also uses freelancers to supplement McCracken’s daily posts, a lot.

But what I like better still and which I hope to see even more of in the tech blogosphere at large is the obvious respect McCracken has for accurate reporting, strong journalism standards and also trenchant analysis that actually gives a reader insight into a story.

In addition, McCracken is a very nice guy, as you will see from this video, where we discuss a range of things (and yes, PC Word-style, I get him to make a list of key tech issues too).

Here’s the video:

Crovitz knows a thing or two about the transition mainstream media has been making to new media and, more importantly, was never scared of the change. For us, that was critical, since he consistently said yes to our efforts to create a new kind of tech site within Dow Jones.

Tonight, he appears at a Churchill Club event called “Like It or Not, You’re in the Media Business: It’s Time to Make the Publishing Upheaval Work for You.”

Other speakers include: Neil Chase, VP of author services for Federated Media; Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst of Outsell Inc.; and Jeanette Gibson, editor-in-chief of News@Cisco (CSCO). The event is moderated by Sam Whitmore, editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

A description of the event: “Internet technology has made you a publisher. How can you turn that into a huge win for your career and your business? Well, first you might want to study what traditional publishers have learned, and what they’re doing to transform their business. After all, they ought to know. Then look at all the commercially successful bloggers: how did they do that? Then consider Cisco Systems, one of the world’s most successful tech vendors, and why it is now a successful publisher in its own right.”

It takes place tonight, starting at 6 p.m. for dinner, followed by the program at 7 p.m. at the San Mateo (Calif.) Marriott.

Best of all, friends of AllThingsD.com can save $15 off the general rate of $82 by using the discount code here when registering in advance. After inputting your name badge information, you will be shown a payment screen where you can input the discount code: gAllThingsD. If you encounter any difficulties in registering online, email your name, title and company to the Churchill Club at registration@churchillclub.org.

BoomTown video on this interesting topic to come, of course!

Is there a trend in my post yesterday about the deal former Hollywood execs Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman struck with Pepsi to make original online content that the entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant will have a chance to fund and sponsor?

“We want to create great online content … and also something that is more than a glorified Internet ad at the same time,” said Braun to me yesterday. “So we’ll work with Pepsi hand-in-hand to bake new kinds of ad solutions right in organically at the earliest possible moment.”

What struck me was that this was also the same line being touted by Facebook ad sales majordomo Mike Murphy, whom I interviewed Tuesday about what it will take to make the popular social-network site as popular with advertisers. (See video below again.)

Bandying about the phrase, “return on involvement,” he noted that it was his job to show marketers that becoming part of the conversation could be as important as much-measured click-through rates.

“Banners are great for branding, but this is a more relevant message that leverages social media,” said Murphy. “If we can help you make your idea or product relevant to a consumer and get the best involvement rate … it’s a different game.”

And then last month Valleywag posted here on an amazingly idiotic roundelay about a group of bloggers associated with John Battelle’s Federated Media being part of a Microsoft ad campaign, by weighing in on what the software giant’s “people ready” catchphrase meant to them.

I was going to write about it, and even talked to Om Malik (he was sorry and withdrew from the campaign) and Battelle (not so sorry, noting to me that how we all look at marketing has changed in the new paradigm).

But the prospect of headache-inducing debates about it that would go precisely nowhere stopped me cold. I come from an Italian family and I know from pointless arguments.

My own conclusion was that, even with all the disclosure, which could have been a lot better, it was probably a dicey and even flat-out wrong thing for most bloggers to do.

Except apparently for Michael “Pound Sand” Arrington, who doesn’t appear to care what most anyone thinks anyway. (Are you looking at me?)

But Battelle has kept bringing up another interesting phrase called “conversational marketing”–which again refers to engaging audiences more deeply with advertisers. Federated, in fact, is having a “Conversational Marketing Summit” in mid-September, with a laundry list of Web marketing honchos.

It apparently “brings together leaders in conversational media and marketing for a two-day dialog around the issues, lessons and opportunities of this emerging medium.”

I, for one, am looking forward to understanding what it all means, despite the fact my initial reaction is suspicious, as a reporter who naturally worries about the sidling up of ad-sales people to the editorial process.

That feeling of distaste was articulated by Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee, who wrote that the Pepsi deal “sounds kind of sleazy, honestly.”

Well, we shall see, of course, and this is just entertainment we’re talking about. And, perhaps more important, it seems to be an inevitable drift, given trends toward increased interactivity by consumers, especially younger ones.

“A lot of online content is already developed and ads and marketing are slapped on afterward,” Russell Weiner, vice president of marketing for colas at Pepsi-Cola North America told me yesterday. “We want to be part of the DNA of a show from the very beginning.”

And that, I think, is what they call the origin of the species. What species that might be, we shall all see soon enough.