... 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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DemocracyInAction is back to hunting inexpensive webinar/online conferencing tools. A few weeks ago, our our existing provider sent us an e-mail announcing:

We have decided to significantly change our company's focus, thereby exiting the web conferencing business completely. Because of this business decision, we have stopped renewing existing subscriptions and have ceased selling new subscriptions for our ASAP products.

Since "Convoq is an innovative provider of SaaS integrated online meeting and live chat systems", that must have been one heck of a business decision. All the same, in our two-plus years using Convoq's ASAP tool, we've had great results, so we bid our erstwhile collaborators fair tidings on their journey which we hope does not necessitate harbor in a capitalized and numbered Chapter. What it certainly does is thrust DIA back into the market for online meeting tools.

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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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Either by accident or some inscrutable will of the cosmos, three different parties in the last month or so have come knocking for insight into web meeting tools. Since we run regular webinars, we traffic this space a bit -- and while I'd hardly characterize any of us here as experts in the field of online meeting software, it's not inconceivable that the evaluation of tools we've had to do might be useful to others.

If you're looking for web meeting/screencasting/live presentation software that's more affordable than the name-brands like WebEx, there are some pretty good options available, with an open source project in the pipes. DemocracyInAction uses ASAP by Convoq, which costs $500 a year but has unlimited meetings, and very rarely have poor feedback on it from clients: meeting participants just need a recent version of Flash. A few months ago, we re-upped for a second year.

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