Tomorrow’s showtime. The hearing starts at 11:30 a.m. Eastern. The buzz on Twitter this afternoon was encouraging, with a lot of great tweeting going on about American Library Association, EFF, CREDO Action’s alerts — and ours, too. The Facebook group continues to grow, although somewhat more slowly than Twitter; and we’re close to making ‘popular’ on digg.* There’s definitely a lot of energy around the issue. Will we be able to tap into it?
One big question is how much pickup we get overnight and early in the morning from bloggers. The Wilshire and Washington folks have something on the Huffington Post; Jason Rosenbaum just posted on The Seminal; will others follow their lead? Our Calling all bloggers post has simple talking points … if you know any bloggers, please pass it along to them.
One way or another, we’ll get together tomorrow during the hearing for activism during the hearing. We’ll keep http://bit.ly/oct1hearing updated with the top-priority actions as we target specific Senators on the phone, Twitter, and Facebook. And of course we’ll also be sharing them via Twitter.
Twitter activism is the fastest of any of the social networks, and so that’ll be where a lot of the action is tomorrow. If you’re not a member already, please consider joining — it’s easy to sign up, and our If you’re new to Twitter page has getting-started information. An extra 20 or 30 people will makes a big difference.
Other than that, tonight’s the night to get the word out. Please pass the link to Jason’s post or my post on Pam’s House Blend. Retweet early and often. Share links on Facebook.
And get ready for tomorrow; with luck, it could be pretty wild!
jon
* Speaking of which, if you haven’t dugg yet, please do. If you’re not a member, it’s easy to sign up.
Wthashtag’s stats for the #patriotact tag.
Ready to go viral?
Get FISA Right 
And if you’d like to help retweet:
Thanks!
Oh well. We did get some excellent activism-focused posts from Tracy Viselli on Reno and its Discontents and Jessica Pieklo on Care2 and a nice link from Julian Sanchez from a story cross-posted to American Prospect and Cato@Liberty … but the hoped-for wave failed to emerge. It’s frustrating because the issue got coverage: Glenn Greenwald had a podcast with the ACLU, Marcy Wheelier had some good insights on Emptywheel, Kevin Bankston live-blogged the hearings for EFF, and David Kravetz covered it in Wired. But alas none of them mentioned anything about our activism. Disappointing.
Then again, there were other problems as well. I mistimed the retweet requests so it crested after the meeting. Twitter search wasn’t working well early in the morning, so it was hard to follow what was going on. We had problems with the chat room. Drat. Betrayed by technology.
Still. There’s a good base here for another run at it next week as we head to the SJC vote on Feingold’s NSL amendment and immunity. And the connections we’ve made (and experience we’ve gained) will be useful in the ongoing battles as the bills goes through the House and Senate and into committee. Libertarian bloggers have been picking up the story — Jim Babka of DownsizeDC has been doing yeoman’s work — and there continues to be a lot of discussion on Twitter.
To be continued.