Last week, I was happily surprised by an initiative that @JaimeH, one of our members in TuDiabetes, came up with. She has a way with graphics, so she offered to make Virtual Santa hats for people on Twitter in exchange for a micro-donation of $1.50 to benefit TuDiabetes.com.

That started Dec. 3. To date, she's raised a little more than $250! Talk about perseverance... and people keep asking how they can get their Virtual Santa Hats!

Recently, I woke up with an idea for a video leading up to World Diabetes Day, this coming Nov. 14. It would have a fun theme, a-la-Charlie Chaplin, with some unusual photos that would hopefully get people's attention... so I wondered whether using some ACTUAL music like the one Charlie Chaplin's movies had would be possible.

It turned out that his first movie, Making a Living, was in the public domain. With some trial-and-error on iMovie, I was finally able to extract the audio track from the video (Archive.org carries the entire movie, for you to download) and with a few hours of editing work, this is what resulted:

With a few more days to go before our deadline of Nov. 1, I wanted to appeal to the rest of the NetSquared readers to help us reach our goal of 20,000 signatures, in an attempt to appeal to Google so they will consider doing a World Diabetes Day doodle on Nov. 14.

So far we have collected a little under 9,000 signatures (using iPetitions.com, if you are curious) on DiabetesDoodle.com.

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.

We just wrapped up a couple of days ago our fundraising campaign at the Diabetes Hands Foundation, which was maintly done through online donations made using a ChipIn Widget on a number of web sites, starting with TuDiabetes.com.

 There are many lessons we learned and many things we will apply the next time we run a fundraising campaign. Nevertheless, we are VERY happy with the results: we raised a total of $7,000 and the entire outreach process was conducted online.

Here is a Thank You video I posted thanking our members for their support:

Following the book, at the Diabetes Hands Foundation we have put out a number of press releases about our work since we started our work last year. To do so, we have spent $80 per press release using PRWeb (a friend of mine who is head of PR at a midsize company and had budget for more than that said she hadn't gotten any more out of PRWeb paying more money).

I wanted to share with the NetSquared community a recent success we experienced at the Diabetes Hands Foundation.

By getting in the radar of YouTube's Nonprofits & Activism channel, we were able to get the video below (called "Drawing Diabetes: Diabetes Through the Eyes of Children") to be featured on it, resulting in more than 26,000 views.

We are very happy with the results and highly recommend making sure you contact the people (Sending them a Message through their YouTube channel page, once you have a video for their consideration) managing their Nonprofit Vlog.

The Diabetes Hands Foundation runs three different units. One of them, our Online Communities, operates TuDiabetes.com (in English) and EsTuDiabetes.com (in Spanish), two social networks for people touched by diabetes.

I just posted a summary of the conference on our foundation's blo. Hope it is useful to those who missed any of the sessions I attended.

First off, let me say THANKS to everyone at the conference that I had the chance (should I say honor, to be more fair?) to meet and talk to. These were two of the most enlightening days I've experienced in a long time and undoubtedly, a conference that will long remain in my mind as one of the most useful ones I've attended.

I wanted to share the del.icio.us boomarks I collected in the past couple of days, in case it's helpful to others: http://del.icio.us/askmanny/n2y3