I left the IRC client on but it disconnected but fortunately I managed to get the minutes from the chat. It was very interesting, thanks Bill.
I would like to clarify somethings and put in some of my own ideas here as I couldn't make it to the chat (sleeping). It would be great if Bill could answer
With regard to this natural linking business I was wondering who is effected more - the person been linked to or the person linking out.
For example - there is a site which has very unnatural linking, I'm guessing that this site will suffer some negativity from SEs more so than the sites it would be linking to - that is sort of obvious. But how does it effect the sites it links to? I'm thinking its effect would be nominal, but if a site was linked to from a lot of unatural sites then it would definately have a negative effect. But reflecting on your estimation of 15% chaos needed then as long as you maintain a decent amount of chaos (approx. 15%) from outside linking then you will be okay and those unatural links will still be of benifit.
Most people including myself like to stick thier link trades at the bottom of the page all next to each other or down the side of the page, but all clumped together either way. You said this was unnatural. So to counter this you should put some links into your content as paragraphs (in a way that you would if you weren't trying to make money out of your site). I guess you would want your linking partners to do the same for you to give you some randomness for your inbound links - but I'm guessing most people are not going to do this.
But I think its worthwhile to try to get some of your link partners to give you some more natural recips in paragraphs and get them to write it themselves and then you do the same for them, therefore giving both of you randomness on both your outbound and inbound links. I guess it would probably help if these were three way trades, maybe even four or fiveway trades to add to the randomness.
Its something you did not discuss but I also think is a good idea is getting your link partners to occasionally link to the deeper pages on your site. This i think is more natural than index to index all the time. Also you will target different keywords in your link back text - again more natural.
Well thats about all I have to say - it would be good if you could comment on it bill.