EchoDitto

In about 3 hours, I'll be boarding a plane to head back to the Big Easy - New Orleans, that is. Unlike last month, Brian Reich and I are headed that direction to attend this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference held by the Nonprofit Technology Network, better known as NTEN.

If you're heading that way or know someone who is, please don't hesitate to flag us down - or you can follow us on twitter to find out where we'll be.

What happens when you take all of the money you were going to spend on marketing and advertising and pour it into customer service instead? Well, first of all, customer service becomes a core value rather than an isolated department.

Zappos is an online shoe store born during the dot-com heyday. Their creation story isn't particularly inspiring: they saw people selling stuff like pet food online and figured shoes would work, too. But they've since evolved into a manifestation of everything that is good about e-commerce (or online shopping, for those who swore off adding e- to everything).

I have to admit that the idea of an “unconference” made me a little uncomfortable. No set agenda? No prepared presentations? No experts? What was there to prevent the entire thing from dissolving into chit chat about the best Woot items and JLo’s babies? The answer, I discovered, is a good-sized group of smart, thoughtful people with a variety of experience, who are willing to share new projects, discuss best practices, and admit to not knowing all of the answers.

So what did those smart people say? Here are 5 insights--one per session.

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.

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?

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.

Last Thursday, I pulled myself away from my desk for a field-trip to Yahoo!'s "Rise of Citizen 2.0" event. It was pretty freakin' cool. Ok, #1 - it's Yahoo! Granted, our shrine for Yahoo! is significantly dwarfed by Google's, but come on. Besides, they did have best party at SxSW so expectations were high!

The main part of the afternoon event was, of course, listening to Karl Rove talk about the internet and politics. For an invite-only event, the crowd was much smaller and more intimate than I thought it would be. Ingeniously, Yahoo! never actually published the agenda anywhere (that I could find) prior to the event so there was no sneaking in at the last minute for the big show!

I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy are my arms tired!

Well, not really - actually I got back about two weeks ago, but what with finalizing development and launching President Clinton's newest site and the Bears beating the Packers, I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts and set them down via an interblag. Well, now that things have calmed down slightly, I figured I'd give it a shot.

First of all, Barcelona is an amazing city. It's incredibly metropolitan - sort of like New York on a smaller scale and with more spanish, although most people with whom I interacted spoke great English. It's really easy to get around, which was good since the conference was taking place at CitiLab Cornélia, on the outskirts of the city.

*Overheard while waiting in line for the ladies' room at BlogHer 2007

The third annual BlogHer conference kicked off on Friday at Chicago's Navy Pier. As BlogHer founders Jory Des Jardins, Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort told a packed auditorium during the opening session, this year's conference drew 800 particpants, making it the largest gathering of bloggers ever (regardless of gender). Wow. And what a gathering it was. Bloggers from all over the country and around the world came together to discuss the latest trends in technology, the art of self-promotion, effective strategies for building community online, and how blogs help all of us express ourselves and explore our personal and professional identities.