The picture above is from We Are The 99 Percent, a Tumblr blog where people post stories of economic hardship. The chart below shows the frequency of posts on the blog since it got going in early September. I've posted this because my hunch is that out of all the online manifestations of the "Occupy Wall Street" protests, it is the closest thing to a barometer of how much traction the movement is getting.

While the so-called "Facebook revolutions" in the Arab world were nothing of the sort*, what's going on in America right now may be the world's first genuine social-media uprising. Besides the standard channels of Facebook, whose Occupy Wall St page now has nearly 170,000 fans, Twitter, where the hashtags #occupywallst and #ows spew out dozens of tweets a minute, and of course a dedicated website, Occupy Together, protesters are also organising via Meetup, which at the time of this writing shows events planned in over 1,300 cities worldwide. On the fund-raising site Kickstarter, the founders of Occupy Wall Street Media have already brought in more than six times their original target for publishing a protest newspaper, flyers and posters, and a couple who started with the modest ambition of raising $1,000 for a film about the movement are now urgently telling supporters that their "real" goal is much higher.

The problem, of course, is that this feverish online activity bears only an obscure relationship to what's happening on the street. Most of the planned gatherings on the Meetup page are tiny, and it's doubtful that most of them will take place. On the other hand, for the main cities, the numbers are misleading: New York, for example, has only 40 "occupiers", though Zuccotti Park is full to overflowing.

Facebook fans aren't much of a guide to anything, since you can become one and then forget about it entirely. Tweets are slightly better, as they indicate how many people are aware of an event while it's going on. But they indicate only awareness, not support. And it's hard to work out the overall trend of the past few days because people have been moving from the #occupywallst hashtag to the shorter #ows (click on the images below for updated charts):

Which is why I'm interested in We Are The 99 Percent. Writing out your story and taking a picture of yourself doesn't require the commitment and perhaps risk of going to a march, even if there's one going on in your area; but it does take a bit more effort than writing a tweet or clicking a "Like" button. Even if some of the stories are made up, anyone who goes to the trouble of doing so probably identifies strongly with the movement anyway. Posting to the blog is a way of saying you really care. If the movement is gaining support, my guess is that the blog should grow.

The stories make depressing reading. They also give the lie to the idea, spread about when the protests first began, that the people behind the protests don't know what they want. What they want is pretty clear: jobs, cheaper health care, cheaper education, and relief from suffocating debt. (Alan Grayson, a Democratic former congressman from Florida, won hero-worship from the protestors for his punchy articulation of these demands on Bill Maher's show last Friday. Could he be the leader they're looking for?)

However, as of now there are some 1,100 posts on the blog, which isn't a lot for a country in which tens of millions are out of work, in debt and bereft of health insurance. And the number of posts per day fluctuates, but doesn't seem to have been rising on average over the last couple of weeks. I'll be tracking this blog, and updating the chart from time to time, to keep an eye on its progress.

* Look at Facebook's penetration in the countries with the most turmoil—less than 4% in Libya, 5.5% in Egypt, and a larger but hardly massive 17.5% in Tunisia—and it's clear that while these media may have helped mobilise a core group, traditional word-of-mouth and al-Jazeera television played a much bigger role. (For more on that, see Hugh Eakin's good piece in the New York Review of Books on Qatar's wily diplomatic game.)