That’s me, looking for very specific ripples, and currents, in the vast placid ocean that is the blogosphere, where one twitch by a blog-fish on the far side of that body can be magnified by other blog-fish with sensitive antennae reflected, magnified and passed on, passed back and forth, linked and sent rippling out into the farthest reaches. When I say blog-fish, I don’t really mean a fish, really – fins and gills and all that. I picture something more like a Portuguese man o’war, with all those sensitive tentacles and tendrils hanging down, floating and lurking, waiting patiently for some little current, a change in temperature, some isolated agitation. And there is always something of the sort out there, some little agitation that starts on a discussion thread, and gets linked and blogged, and copied to someone elses’ website, and pretty soon… voila, a tempest. Sometimes the tempest is so huge that it spills over into the political arena and the general mainstream media – a veritable Hurricane Katrina. Rathergate is the classic example for me: the source documents upon which a 60 Minutes story about former President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard was based, were posted online after the story aired, some little things about them which didn’t seem just right were noted almost at once, and all throughout the next day, the storm grew and grew. I spent a lot of time on-line that day, as it was slow in the office where I worked then, and I saw the storm expand, as more and more other experts in obscure fields checked in and commented, and were quoted and linked and… well, everyone knows how that turned out. My point was that someone going on line, and surfing around a bit in the correct quadrant would encounter the outlaying ripples of this coming storm within a very few minutes.

So in my capacity as the media expert for the local Tea Party planning committee, I’ve been quietly snorkeling around, doing google searches on various phrases (the google-fu… it is powerful in this one!), looking for chatter about Tea Parties in general, and the San Antonio one in particular. Yeah, I’m curious, but it would help to know just how unglued that any local radicals are becoming, if we might have counter-protestors or provocateurs. Finding a lot of ranting, or calls for action, cross-linking and commenting on the San Antonio Tax Day Tea Party would be a cause for concern, and something that we would have to be prepared for, in a good Public Affairs professional sort of way. It is always nice to know from which direction the next sh*tstorm will blow in.

And I found… well, not very much at all, among the Kossaks, the Huff-pos, and the Duers. A lot of cross talk and interest on the center/conservative/libertarian blogs, lots of events being planned, and lots of plans being generated and shared. But the leftwards wing of the blogosphere is all but silent. No ripples at all, no storm of interest and awareness building. Oh, a couple of sniggering discussions about a small group of KKK/racist/hater/losers who might have four, or twenty-five show up at their pathetic little rallies, but aside from those discussion threads – hardly any mention. Really, it’s as if they are in a tightly-closed little bubble. And they are, in a way. The various tea parties are getting some local media mention, but very few national outlets other than the Wall Street Journal and our own very dear PJ Media are really going all out to tie it all together. It’s as if it is all happening under the news radar; if you aren’t involved in a Tea Party, or snorkeling around in the center/conservative/libertarian section of the big pool, it’s as if there is nothing at all going on at all. Nothing to see, move on, and lets all talk about-insert name of current tabloid fave celebrity here.

But there is. And it will be big. On April 16, I rather think there will be a lot of stunned citizens (and legislators and major media folks) picking themselves up off the ground and saying, “Did anyone get the number of that 18-wheeler that just ran us over?”