Our friends over at Wired for Change were mentioned in the Washington Post on Monday. The article, "Liberal Bloggers Brace for Victory," covered the left-wing blogosphere and the 2008 election. Here's a snippet:

This past weekend, those same types showed up, plus tech firms such as
Wired for Change, hawking an online product called Salsa that helps
groups engage people through e-mail lists. There's no denying that the
gathering has crossed the mainstream threshold when swag bags, complete
with El Sabroso Salsita salsa chips, were handed out alongside condoms
from the Center for Constitutional Rights.

and so can your small town. I'm not writing to brag about the 20 folks who came out to our

501 Tech Club at the 501 Lounge (yep, there's a swanky bar called the 501 Lounge). Or the 35 folks who came to our meet up last month. Or the 60 organizations who have expressed interest in the club.

Laugh it up big city dwellers. I know, these numbers seems small, but for towns with less than 100K (Mlsa is about 70K), these are great metrics.

I'm writing to encourage folks to in smaller towns to consider starting your own 501 Tech Club through NTEN as a way to create a supportive technology network.

Last Friday, the Washington, D.C. metro system broke its all-time ridership record. Odds are that by the time you're reading this, Friday's record will have fallen a few times over again.

As DCist points out, there wasn't much special about Friday, July 11 -- just a nondescript summer day that "smashed" (well, okay, barely topped) the Reagan funeral record.

But this wasn't just some random blip.

Apart from Mondays, which seem to be systematically lower-ridership days (just like with online fundraising), Metro's top 25 weekday ridership days basically reads like the last few pages of my day planner. Every non-holiday Tuesday-through-Friday date for the past four weeks is among the very busiest days of Metro's history.

One of the most popular panels at the DemocracyInAction User Conference was -- no surprise -- fundraising.

This information-dense presentation from OMP's Katherine Watier and Courtney Ussery had the whole room scribbling notes furiously. (More of Katherine's brilliance at her Search Marketing for Nonprofits blog.)

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We'll be pulling this presentation and others together on Salsa Commons, but this highlight has been a hot ticket, so why wait?

Thanks again, Katherine and Courtney!

I've put together a map of all the DIA community in North America. Enjoy.

Lawrence Lessig ... speaking to a packed house at the DIA user conference keynote.

(ot) Seating nailed down at the power strip oasis. Why are there never enough outlets? airports are a special offender in this ... or, maybe i should think about a computer with more than 30 seconds of battery life.

Last week, David and I closed up the San Francisco office and headed down to LA. On Friday, we met up with organizers who are using Salsa and held the first ever DIA SoCal Users Forum.

We started the agenda with a demo of the new Actions 2.0 tool, and then folks shared questions and stories from their own adventures in online organizing.