The "writing from your parents' basement" charge against a blogger (a charge usually hurled by other bloggers, of course) is one of the more pure expressions of 18th century liberal ideology openly used in contemporary discourse: to be in legitimate public discourse, you must rule your own household; economic dependency conflates with weakness and ignorance.

This already consigns the target to the space of childhood, so perhaps it's no surprise that such an emasculating arrangement comes with a specific parent.

It's here! In the spirit of providing the best learning opportunities, networking possibilities and progressive leadership for 2008 and beyond, we've been working hard on preparing our first ever community conference.

We're talking two days of hands-on, interactive training from DemocracyInAction staff and your colleagues in other member organizations!

The conference will take place in Washington, D.C. on June 26-27th at the Hotel Palomar. If you haven't checked the location out yet, it's a sustainably developed hotel in the heart of Dupont Circle with fabulous conference space (think windows in every room) and delicious meal plans (vegans and veggies, rejoice!)

A Petition Fish! Oceana's Seafood Campaign thought outside the petition box, and let supporters get creative in their protest for mercury warnings at Giant.

Find out tons more about this campaign to "hold the mercury". Is your supermarket on the green or red list?

We dropped our last intermittent e-mail newsletter a couple weeks ago, and between the reminder of the upcoming user conference and the introductions of all our new staff members ... we reckoned we'd go put them online.

You'll find it living on our newsletter signup box on the sidebar, too.

DIA recently co-sponsored the first-ever women’s telesummit organized by Women Who Tech . There were over 650 participants with a ton of great panels , all led by women.

This is amazing! I mean how many conferences have you been to where all the participants AND panelists were women. No wonder it worked so well.

One thing that struck me was how natural all of this felt. I had to remind myself that most panels about anything technology related, comprise of largely men. The bottom line is that us gals are underrepresented in the tech sector and it’s time we get out there.

We've been busy! Much of the development is still in beta now, but there will be major improvements rolling out soon. The biggest of these is Action 2.0, which as you might have hear is now open for beta testers. If you'd like to be a beta tester, email us for an account.

• BUG: Fixed display of the "country" field for supporters who are imported with country names instead of country codes. (minor)
• BUG: Fixed display of the error message when a donation amount is larger than the maximum allowed donation (minor)

Like most of the blogoverse, I've consented to the unsatisfying and barely compensated practice of selling myself to Google Adsense on my hobby blog, which I should add is pointedly non-partisan.

I hardly monitor religiously the stuff Google pitches my paltry readership, but you get the occasional one that makes you scratch your head and flip back to the entry to figure out how it made the match.

Other times, there's less mystery than an episode of Columbo. Like when you post about an execution in Iran, and you get ...

Here's Jon and Charles tabling at the NTC conference in New Orleans last week. Check out the entire photostream here!

Save the date and watch for updates: June 26-27 in Washington D.C., at the Hotel Palomar we'll be hosting our first user conference.

A lot's been happening in the year since we rolled out Salsa, both in the toolset and in the space, so there'll be plenty to talk about.

We'll do some tools features, both old standbys and the new toys that seem to roll out every day; we'll do some strategy training and best practices; we'll do a lot of peer learning because there are much smarter people than us doing all kinds of innovative things; we'll have no shortage of socializing, networking, and general merrymaking with the fantastic circle of progressive activists using Salsa; and we'll learn from each other where we should be headed next.

The agenda is in a developmental stage, so if you've got something you're dying to see happen, drop it in the comments here or drop one of us a line.

Wednesday, March 19th...time to topple the pillars of war and empire.

Get the deets on nonviolent action happening around your city at 5yearstoomany.org.