Everyone – and I mean hundreds, if not thousands, of NetSquared community members as well as folks here on the Net2 team – worked their butts off in the last few days, hours and minutes leading up to the big vote on Wednesday.

And you all deserve a good, long rest. Sadly, you aren't going to get it.

Drumroll please . . .

150+ of you submitted nominations and 3,000+ of you voted – Wow! After a very long night spent checking, double checking and triple checking for any irregularities (we will post a summary of our voting validation process shortly), here is an alphabetical list of the 21 Featured Projects (we had a tie between #20 and #21) as chosen by the Net2 community vote and calculated by our online ballot system:

First off, thanks for your patience as we work through the technical problems on the site. We've been, as Britt said, overwhelmed by your response. You all have certainly being doing your job -- getting out the vote. We've slipped on ours -- keeping the site stable and strong while your responses poured in.

We've been taking a break. Sure, there have been postings. And we've been hustling on the inside to make sure that the wrap ups -- the things that need to immediately follow from the conference -- get done. But we've been taking a break from the late nights and weekends. Billy's been in Belize. Daniel is winging his way to Costa Rica. Mark spent time on the east coast. I haven't tripped off anywhere but I've been catching the late ferry to work and the early ferry home. Gina's pushing the Net Tuesdays and, like me, dreaming of a vacation a little later in the year.

But enough's enough. Time to get back to it. Some of what I'm about to write is news; some isn't. In no particular order, here's what I'm thinking:

The whole way home I tried to write this blog post.  Figure out what I wanted to say.  I keep coming back to the same thing: at the end of the conference people were eager to share the work they'd done during the Making It Happen sessions.  You can read Sarah's report to get a sense of what folks did.  

And what then I think of what happens next. How do we take the energy and conversations in the room, on the remote conference and in the hallway, and the collected next actions.  How  do we take all of that and bring it back to our everyday world -- our community and conversations?

It's 50 short minutes with Angela Glover Blackwell but the issues she brings up -- race and poverty and creating spaces for conversation and demonstrating change -- take much more than 50 minutes.  We can use the session space -- Conversation with Angela Glover Blackwell -- to keep asking questions and try and move the conversation into Next Actions.

Thanks to all of you, the focus of Net2 gets clearer and clearer in response to the community's interests and needs. And at the same time, we've grown by leaps and bounds (as many of you know from taking part in the community, uploading case studies, checking out the resource centers and listening to the podcast).

So we've responded with a brand new, totally overhauled About page. It's an at-a-glance overview of our entire community, and a great activity hub for beginners. Seasoned hands will want to give it a look, too; you may well find a cool little corner of our Net2 world that you've overlooked until now.

Check it out here.

If you go to the conference registration page today, you'll see something pretty surprising:

• Thanks to overwhelming demand, the NetSquared conference is already full.
• We're maintaining a waiting list, but we expect few spaces will become available, if any.
• We're launching an all-out effort to broaden participation for those who can't attend, with online tools and offline gatherings.

We filled up way, way more quickly than we expected. And just a few years ago, this post (and our options) would probably end right there.

We recently had the chance to do an email interview Ian Kennedy a project manager in Yahoo!'s social media group. Ian answered a series of questions about tagging, social media, and data portability. Ian also brainstormed some of the ways Yahoo!'s tools can be used by nonprofits.

NetSquared: Tagging seems to be the must-have feature du jour. Can you give us a quick - two or three sentence description of tagging?

Ian Kennedy: Tagging is a new way of organizing information based on labels that are applied ad hoc by an individual. These labels can cut across established directories or hierarchies. I may tag a photo of my dog "Lucy" and that tag will be familiar to my family and friends. You may tag that same photo "dog." Tagging allows for both the personalized and generalized views to co-exist side by side and be recalled in a way that is familiar and personal to you.

Over at Blog for gleesos, he writes:

I think what we are seeing is that now the web is being able to be used in a new and exciting way, and it is more the culture of the web that is changing - as apposed to the tools. Yes the tools are needed - but as time goes on the tools will change and update, but the opportunity presented by the web for people to not only have there say but choose to listen to what they think is worth hearing becomes a significant cultural shift.

Go on. Read the whole thing. If you'd like to answer the four questions, be our guest (you need to be logged in for that link to work).