Virtual Rallies

I want to briefly discuss an upcoming aspect of One Million Blogs for Peace: Virtual Rallies.

This philosophy of Virtual Rallies for OMBFP will be to create an active presence on the web for the movement to accomplish certain aims. Early on, most of these aims will be to spread the word about the project. Later, the focus will be to demonstrate the size and breadth of pro-peace sentiment across combatant countries and the world.

You may be envisioning something like all entering a chat-room and chanting a text slogan. This is not exactly what I mean by a Virtual Rally. Rather, the concept is to use the simultaneous presence and agreement of many unique individuals at websites where this can make a meaningful impact.

A key example (and the likely first Virtual Rally point) is digg.com. This is a website that tracks news stories, videos, and other links of interest through a system of voting amongst registered members. The Virtual Rally would involve participants registering as digg.com users and then all voting for an OMBFP article within a short period of time, thus vaulting the article to the top of the page. This site (81st most visited site in the world, according to Alexa) carries enormous weight with the hearts and minds of internet users. By influencing such a site with a brief, dedicated impact, we can help spread the word and/or change opinions.

The Virtual Rallies will be the core point of action for One Million Blogs for Peace and one of the key ways we can make a real impact on peoples' opinions and, ultimately (hopefully), the tide of this war.

Notification of upcoming and active Virtual Rallies will be via e-mail to members, posting here, and likely a Virtual Rally subpage of OMBFP.

If you have suggestions for possible Virtual Rally ideas or sites, please don't hesitate to let me know!