The weight of public response to the bailout measure that's had all Congress atwitter this fortnight overwhelmed House servers earlier this week, slowing or preventing some messages to Representatives.

As of this writing, with debate underway on the floor (liveblog at the Grey Lady; video stream at C-SPAN), the writerep system appears to be functioning normally for this writer but still displays this warning:

Due to an unusually high amount of emails currently being submitted through the Write Your Representative feature (above), you may experience a slow response or error message when attempting to send emails through this system during hours of peak demand. We apologize for this inconvenience. Our technicians are working to fix the problem. Thank you.

So what's an activist organization to do?

The quadrennial -- or biennial, now that the summer and winter games are staggered -- hypocrisy irony of the "Olympic Movement" formulation from the mouthpieces of global capital is probably not actually any more finely described by Beijing's turn on the stage than by any other ruthless global hegemon's. Hey, Mary Lou Retton was sticking vaults and selling breakfast cereal while Central America was crawling with death squads.

But China has brought renewed hand-wringing from the guardians of right-thinking about the wrongness of bringing politics into a "Movement" so palpably political from the get-go, and so explicitly marked in its most memorable moments -- Jesse Owens in Berlin, the Blood in the Water match -- by political valences.

And then, of course, there's this:

The DIA Salsa users at the Center for Constitutional Rights recently gave a great illustration of the power of smart targeting and messaging to balloon an online list ... paired, of course, with one smooth-handling e-advocacy tool.

I caught CCR's Owen Henkel on the way out the door to a well-deserved break to find out just how they cooked up the pitch-perfect Send Bush a Copy of the Constitution online action.

How did you come up with it? Were you looking specifically for something with virality, or did that follow the brilliance of the idea?

I had the opportunity to "sit down with" -- read: e-mail -- Jim Gilliam of Brave New Films about the Fox Attacks campaign to hit the "news" channel where its advertisers are.

The campaign has taken blogistan by storm, which Brave New Films seems to have down to a science. So what's the magic behind the curtain?

Read on ...

There's nothing like receiving a verdict of life or death while doing something embarrassingly trivial to force one out of the mundane.

It was sometime around the sixth inning of a lackluster dog-days game between two dog teams at seemingly vacant RFK Stadium that my old comrade had a text message reporting that a man won't be put to death tomorrow.

Such a tiny little message, and so many mountains moved to get it.

From my posting yesterday until today so much has been going on! I almost don't know where to begin.

More people are around, so the hallways of the civic center, and the streets of downtown Atlanta are quite full. The plenary sessions that begin and end each day have more people, although that's more true for the 6:30 pm sessions than the 8:30 am sessions. Could it be that folks are tired after a long night of carousing?

Kip has been connecting with his communities and friends – the radical queer community, Indyvoter folk, his old friends from the Southeast, and friends (like Dave at Radical Designs) from the Bay Area.

I was able to attend a session on the Israel/Palestine issue, but missed another one that sounded really good. A lot of my time is spent distributing the newsletter with information about online organizing that the tech folks put out. One strategy is to stand facing the crowd and pass it out. Unfortunately, this is the technique pioneered by political parties of the communist variety, and many folks instinctively recoiled from me. Could it be my breath?

The US Social Forum kicked off yesterday with DIA literally in the house. The locals here call it the 'Civic Center' and it’s where an estimated 10,000 activists, organizers and revolutionary tourists will be spending part of the next few days. Among them yours truly and Kip Williams, on a mission to spread the gospel of online organizing as a powerful agent of change.

Kip spent the morning helping with registration, a process that could have been a disaster. But it wasn’t! Key members of the Information & Communication Technology team, including Ana Willem, made sure that all went well. Here and there he still had a chance to make beautiful music ...

Most of my day was spent sitting at the DIA table and talking to folks about technology. I’ve been able to meet some great folks: a Hawai'i native scholar and activist, AFSC folks who work on Africa issues, and one of April's old teachers the Friends World College. (Kathleen says hello!)

Charles holding up the Technology for Another World, the publication of the tech committee at the USSF.

Below are some handy suggestions I pulled from the presentation Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses which was presented at NTEN’s Technology 2007 Conference.

The Serial Approach - Consider offering a series of short videos (2-3 minutes) that explain your issue, instead of making an expensive project video (or in addition to). See how I Love Mountains features short videos about the destructive practice of mountaintop removal on their homepage.