Friends, conference season is upon us. The month of March holds great promise for the schmoozers among us, as well as those just looking to learn. In the next two weeks alone, you'll find Dittos at WeMedia in Miami, DrupalCon in Boston, IPDI's Politics Online in DC, and of course, South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin (more on that soon).

But as we tracked all of these great opportunities, we realized others might want to know about some of the same events. So we created a calendar that you can consult at http://www.echoditto.com/conferences. more

It's no secret that we are overwhelmed with media. We feel guilt that we're not using our Netflix subscription to its full potential. We feel guilt when we haven't taken our turn in Scrabulous in a few days. And columnists keep telling me that I have 500 channels of cable programming (even though I only have about 100). Through this noise, an altruistic subset of the creative class attempts to bring our attention to the issues and causes that desperately need our attention.

We know many of the causes already. We've been asked to sign the petitions, to write our representatives, and to dig deeper than the nightly news dares to. And for a while it worked. When I was 8, I made my dad call the phone number in the credits at the end of Free Willy and adopt a whale (I sincerely hope the nation of Japan respects our $20 pledge). After a certain number of appeals, though, we learn to put up a wall between the few areas we feel we can do something about and the vast array of causes that cry for that attention. But documentaries have a way of inspiring the jaded and engaging the blissfully ignorant. Who would have ever predicted that a film about Al Gore's slideshow could serve as the catalyst for a global movement? more

If you look into the sky this Tuesday evening you may see a mid-winter migration of Dittos along the East Coast. Jets leaving from Boston, New York and Washington DC will converge in New Orleans, Louisiana for our annual retreat (and beignets). We'll plug in our Wiis, Xboxes and DDR mats in a historic (albeit haunted) home in the Garden District mere blocks from the Mardis Gras parade route.

We'll take a break from our usual online community building for a little offline service: painting and gutting Katrina-devastated homes in the 9th Ward with ACORN. more

I co-host a monthly Meetup in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC called NetSquared. We take the original NetSquared concept of "remixing the web for social change" (a project of TechSoup) and apply it at a local level, bringing together seasoned do-gooders, cutting edge technologists, and everyone in between. more

I hope to post a more thorough review of this morning's Facebook Political Summit DC soon, but because Tuesday is the new Monday, at least when naval explorers are involved, for now I present to you these numbers:

Facebook User Metrics:

45 million active users
>200,000 new users / day
115 average friends per user
80 percent of users over 18
75 percent of users out of college (Facebook considers this good for the growth of the site. My friends of the Facebook generation who are seeing people propose, get married, and have babies on Facebook disagree) more

Last Thursday at the Clinton Global Initiative Google announced that Google Checkout will be offered free of charge to nonprofits through 2008. Checkout is Google's answer to Paypal, but the service hasn't gained much traction yet despite a substantial rebate promotion for online shoppers. But this time it's the nonprofits that will benefit: Google won't levy a processing fee on nonprofit transactions through at least 2008.* This may not seem like much, but other credit card processing services (registration required) charge nonprofits anywhere from 3-5% of every online donation. And that adds up. more

Google's PageRank system singlehandedly organizes billions of webpages and baffles SEO charlatans. It works well enough that I never have to click through to the no-man's-land of search results that is Page 2.

But what is your MailRank? Or in other words, where do your emails rank with their recipients? It's hard to tell and you probably don't want to know.

One of my coworker's email clients mysteriously marks all of my missives as 'read', ensuring that some slip through the cracks. He swears he doesn't know why this happens.

Of course, when I'm chugging that first coffee and scanning the day's terrifying tally of fresh emails clogging my inbox, there are definitely emails that are going to have to wait until some other fires are out. People who might yell at me, on the other hand, get a Smart Mailbox of their very own. It's a very scientific system. more

I wasn't sure how New Yorkers were going to react to 50+ costumed bicyclists navigating weekend traffic in Manhattan, but it turns out that New York has a good sense of humor. Children looked on in awe, traffic cops smiled and waved us through intersections, and even when we inevitably drifted out of our lane, the people in cars were concerned about only one thing: What the heck were we? more

Harish has given me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to ride a bike through Brooklyn and Manhattan wearing a wind-inflated bunny suit with 51 others in a similarly ridiculous state of dress. The Aeolian Ride: more