EchoDitto

As you may know, we're always in the lookout for great talent to add to our strategy and technology teams here at EchoDitto. This time around, we're in the hunt for the elusive Mac enthusiast with *NIX chops -- a rare breed indeed, in a land mostly populated by the more commonplace microsoftae closedsourcius.

Are you an open source obsessed Mac-loving hacker, or know someone who is? Learn more at http://www.echoditto.com/careers.

Back in the days of Howard Dean, I spent many late nights with our own "Meetup" Michael Silberman building the tools we would use to organize and empower the leagues of Dean supporters at events in all 50 states and at hundreds of venues. It was a lesson in community building not easily forgotten, and I soon found myself anxiously looking for more opportunities in online/offline organizing. The one I found was both obvious and surprising all at once.

My apartment building is big. Really big. It's actually two buildings, with a combined 800 units between them. When I first moved to DC, I had never lived in a building large enough to warrant a laundry room, much less a gym, and I when I first moved here, I marveled at the density of urban living.

There was some buzz recently after Raw Story exposed Virginia Governor's Mark Warner's campaign/PAC Website before it was completed. The site has since been taken down, but it offered a chance glimpse into what the potential contender's 2008 Presidential bid might look like.

The early look is promising (the Virginia-based design firm that created it clearly did their research.) Incidentally, the author of the current What We're Reading once worked for that firm, lending some credence to their political insights.

The recent release of Google's mapping service has wrought a flourish of creative hacks and other uses of their fantastic GIS and satellite technology.

Among these is the innovative pairing of craigslist and Google Maps that visually interprets craigslist apartment listings, and the nearly over-the-top StompBox, a home-brew vehicle tracking system and mobile hotspot that uses Google Maps in conjunction with Verizon's recently unveiled mobile broadband service.

It's hard to decide where to start with this site, which features up-to-date state polls, (projected) electoral college tracking and an excellent summary of the battle in the senate.

They also get high marks for categorizing their content by partisanship.