Last week, I went to the New Media Marketing Conference offered by DMAW. My reason for going was that I wanted to see what for-profit's were doing with marketing in the days of web 2.0 goodness. Fear not, nonprofits; they're trying to figure out what we've been up to for the last few years. Most of the conference was about the basics of "new media". Should you have a blog? Answer: probably. The most rousing contribution came from CC Chapman*, who delved into just how wide the reach of digital media is for for-profit companies. People are blogging, posting, Twittering, and Facebooking about YOUR company. Angry is better than silent, so pay attention.

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Earlier this month, the DIA blog quietly turned two, making this this our third Blog Day. I find I'm not able to write this with quite the gusto of years past, and indeed I'm in an overall bit of a blogging -- well, let's say "fallow" rather than "lull", shall we? Look, the Internet doesn't exactly need another post bemoaning overall powerlessness in the face of some truly awful stuff, so I won't write that post.* But without wallowing in the awful particulars, it's kind of a drag to muster true enthusiasm for the art of building Facebook groups for interchangeable office-seekers in the current climate. No? Well, I never claimed to have the strongest stomach. In such times, though, everyone needs a few gin joints full of amity and sorrows, still hanging out on some fringe of suddenly-choice real estate where the margins would be better if they just sold to Hooters like the joint across the way. Here's the company with whom I'm drowning my troubles these days:

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... or I became incredibly popular overnight. Still, much love to Akismet, whose current count of spam comments caught is 92,315. I feel more popular already. Just not as popular as e.politics.

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Everyone wonders how we maintain a commanding presence among Technorati's top half-million blogs. When you've got it, you've got it. But you can at least feel like you're dope like us by cribbing from our blog toolkit. I. Drupal, of course, is the content management system for the entire DIA site, and our blogging tool as well -- yes, even though we have a blog tool of our own. Drupal is the base; everything else is superstructure.

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We want to apologize in advance for those among our readers who are distinctly uninterested in our new user interface. This blog has a few different audiences, partially overlapping but still well short of synoptic. (And judging by our Feedburner stats, their names are: mom, and dad.) Some are DIA users; many others are not. Some are in the nonprofit tech space; others only touch it incidentally, and perhaps less from desire than from compulsion. Some are organizers, fundraisers or advocates who only care about technology's ability to extend their work; others are geeks who'd just as soon see code change the world.

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"Lomans not Shamans," says stavrosthewonderchicken, taking stock.

"Conversation as intercourse. Intercourse as commerce. You know somebody's getting fucked. I think it might be us. Ad copy tattoed on our lover's forehead, and we're so inured to it that we don't even notice anymore. We're trying to make love in the middle of the marketplace, but we're just getting screwed."

(Via Wealth Bondage.) Crazed rantings there. Best to put that one on the watch list before his next trip to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport Travelodge.

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Welcome to some new activists joining DIA in the last 24 hours as splog-bots discover our trial account signup page. New Organization created:2010:viagra_online New Organization created:2009:cheap_viagra New Organization created:2008:discount_viagra New Organization created:2007:order_viagra New Organization created:2006:cheap_viagra New Organization created:1992:buy_viagra New Organization created:1991:discount_viagra New Organization created:1990:discount_viagra New Organization created:1989:generic_viagra New Organization created:1988:discount_viagra

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"Watching my brother be executed was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life ..." Death Penalty USA, the blog of DIA users National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, is two entries into a ten-part series called "Creating More Victims," which tells the heartrending stories of family members who lose loved ones to execution. (Here's the first, and the second.)

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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.

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With the last remnants of the 109th Congress reconvening this week for their parting shots, it's a good time to surf over to Public Citizen's Lame Duck Hunt, which sounds seductively like The Most Dangerous Game but turns out to be a project to let the sunshine in on the shenanigans of lawmakers past the grasp of voter accountability.

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