Let me make a brief intro of what I have been doing since Occupy began and what the purpose of this and hopefully future blog entries will be:

 

I am basically a newcomer to the FDL community. I knew of the site’s existence for some months before Occupy Wall Street began, but almost never visited to read anything. On about September 15th I became aware that OWS was supposed to be kicking off on the 17th, the first I had heard of it at all. Being a news junkie I scoured the web for news sources and ways to find out what was happening… and basically found nothing… until I thought to visit FDL.

 

For the first 3 days or so I lurked reading Kevin’s blogs and all the comment threads, until finally I just had to register so I could post and participate in the discussions myself.

 

Mainly what  had been doing since is looking for MSM news articles about OWS since way back in the “first they ignore you” stage. Then I decided that to really get a feel for what was happening I started monitoring the list of Twitter sources Kevin put up to get an unfiltered view.

 

Since then I have reposted tweets in Kevin’s comment threads to try to generate some kind of “sense” of where things were at a given moment and where they might be heading. I’ve also pulled some late hours monitoring incidents with police and reposting tweets for sort of “historical purposes” to preserve evidence for the future if needed.

 

Since the movement has grown too big and too fast to keep up with under a single blog or comments thread, Kevin, Athena1 and others are trying to work out a system to split up the workload.

 

I think most of what I have been doing with the Twitter monitoring might best serve as “raw material” for the Occupy Roundup blog. (Here’s today’s summary of yesterday http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/10/12/state-of-the-occupation-wednesday-roundup/ )

 

So I will try to confine a lot of my reposting of Twitter messages to here to avoid “cluttering up” the comments sections of the other blogs.

 

If I come across anything that seems to indicate unfolding police activity or a  notable direct action by the occupiers I will try to cross-post to Kevin’s blog to alert community at large ( http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/10/12/live-blog-for-ows-day-26-overwhelming-majority-of-americans-know-of-occupy-protests/ ).

 

Here are the main Twitter lists I am following, which often can serve as a “starting point” to determine if certain hashtags might warrant further monitoring:

https://twitter.com/#!/kgosztola/occupy-everywhere

 

https://twitter.com/#!/OccupyTogether/occupy-together