In rolling out our spiffy new Drupal* site, one of the questions we confronted was whether to go with the spiffy Drupal blog application, or stick with the original we'd set up. This sort of thing becomes an interesting question for a software provider ... because the original exploited DIA's own blogging tool. People with software to sell are quite rightly expected to use said software in appropriate contexts in their own operations. Now, in over a year of very diligently eating our own dog food, I've come to rather intimate terms with its texture, flavor, and aftertaste. And I'll say here what I've many times told DIA users considering it: it's a perfectly adequate ready-at-hand startup blog tool. But our core competencies ares online advocacy and e-CRM -- not blogging. So DIA's blog tool, which served us perfectly well for more than a year, will simply never be as feature-rich as purpose-built blogging tools. What ultimately decided us? It's that we've recommended to others exactly the course we're taking now: go ahead and start up in DIA if that's the easiest thing, but as you grow, be ready to start considering more robust tools for a more mature blog. (Idealware has a good report comparing the major brand-name options.) We're never going to put up signup pages or send e-mail blasts apart from DIA's own software. But where blogging is concerned, we're just eating our own best practices. If that's a rationalization ... it sure goes down smooth. *Drupal is a great content management system. For the record, we went Drupal for one of the most common reasons people choose a CMS: the developers we had readily at hand were most familiar with it. We remain, ahem, doggedly agnostic in the Drupal/Joomla/Plone/whatever CMS debate.