This year's theme for Blog Action Day is Poverty. Who could have predicted that financial woes would be so uppermost in so many people's consciousness this month? But true poverty is more than just struggling to make ends meet. Take a look at the U.S. thresholds for the official definition of poverty. Is there any way you could feed your family at that level? I think it would be tough, even with the help of food stamps or public assistance.

You’re sitting in your cubicle, trying to get a grant proposal finished.  Through the thin plastic wall, Ted’s yammering away on the phone.  The phone message light is flashing red, like an emergency beacon signalling your imminent overload.  And then Shannon sticks her head around the corner, and asks if you have a sec…just one second…

Today is Blog Action Day!  This year, the focus of Blog Action Day is poverty - it's a day when thousands of bloggers all focus on one issue with the goal to raise awareness, inspire action, and shake up the blogosphere.

What's this all about?

Twitter may be all the rage, but I find it unintuitive and therefore have not heavily adopted it.

With FriendFeed, however, I can keep up on the "tweets" of folks involved in the nonprofit tech/social media space, and get so much more to boot.

Denook is a brand new company to enter the Crowdsourcing Market.

They offer a creative marketplace for Designers and Clients to connect through a design contest system. The client can host a design contest - it can be a logo, website, flyer, etc and set a cash prize. It then becomes an active listing, and designers can submit entries to win the cash. The client at the end picks the best design they like, and pay the designer.

How is this site user friendly?

mySociety, a nonprofit organization based in the UK that runs most of the best-known democracy and transparency websites in the UK, celebrates five years of working, building, and developing for the common good this month!

Who's mySociety?

A community of volunteers and (paid) open source coders with two missions:

While taking the Millennials Changing America Tour through the New York tri-state area, I was fortunate to be able to visit my mother in Milford, Connecticut on Sunday morning. We attended service at the United Church of Christ (UCC), a mainline Protestant Christian church that has outwardly liberal views of social justice issues.

The World Summit Youth Award is a global contest to create inspirational online content promoting the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations to create a humane, just and liveable world. 

"The World Summit Youth Award showcases you as young developers and serves as a platform for people from all UN member states to work together on the efforts of reaching the Millennium Development Goals!"

Award Guidelines

Ning has gone a long way since they were featured on the Netsquared blog back in March 2007. Besides offering many more features than they had back then, there are now more than 500,000 social networks on Ning.

We recently got interviewed by the folks at Ning along with the folks from the ASPCA Online Community about our use of their platform in TuDiabetes.com and EsTuDiabetes.com to run our social networks for people touched by diabetes.