One of the extraordinary things about the Bay Area is the relative ease with which you can bring a large number of bright, passionate, committed people under the same roof. When it’s a bar (and not just a barcamp but the real thing), so much the better.

And so it was earlier this evening when Sundeep Ahuja — a born connector and former marketing chief for Kiva who’s now on the executive team at RichRelevance.com — organized the second  awareness2action event at the Dragonbar in San Francisco’s North Beach. The event, attended by about 60 people involved with various social causes, featured an hour of socializing and an hour of panelists discussing social enterprises.

On the panel:

• Premal Shah, President of Kiva.org (here’s the video interview with Premal I published last week)

• Kevin Jones, Principal at Good Capital

• Steve Newcomb, serial entrepreneur & founder of Virgance.

No one videotaped the event, but here are a few snippets:

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Tom Watson, one of the people who have made a difference in this space, has written a new book, CauseWired, and here’s a review I published to Amazon.com:

In the past two years I’ve been more and more drawn to the world of social causes. (I’m the co-founder of Ourmedia.org and have participated in some Social Media Camps.)

But something was missing. I needed a roadmap. A guide to the world of using Web 2.0 to do good.

So it was serendipitous that Tom Watson came along with his timely, practical and clueful "CauseWired." (Disclaimer: I’m briefly quoted in it.) I just finished reading this 225-page pearl (the paperback) and now feel much more grounded in knowing the who, what and whys of social actions and philanthropy in the digital age. And, importantly, the "OK, what now?"

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Bad news for podcasters who want to abide by the law — it’ll cost you

Guest post by Matt May

ASCAP has updated its Internet licensing to reference podcasts — oh, excuse me, pod-casts. The move may have been intended to answer some questions as to the legality of using music in podcasts, but, as with the webcasting era, it left a lot of people scratching their heads. Is this all we need, just a $288 license to this agency, to be covered through the end of the year?

Well, there’s some bad news. The truth is that, no, that’s not everything. In fact, the landscape for music licensing is even more confusing than most people would imagine, and it at times consists of entities who may not even want to sell you a license. Here, I try to break them down. Know that I am not a lawyer, and as such am not going to know much more detail than is absolutely necessary.

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