Every once in a while I see someone trying to start a petition for some cause or other. Now the standard model is to have volunteers go out into the streets and physically get people to sign their names on the petition. A rather work intensive method, but it does produce results as people realize that you actually care enough to put significant time and effort into getting all these names.

On the Internet, there are two basic variants that I've seen. One is the e-mail petition, where you're supposed to add your name to an e-mail and pass it on to a few of your friends, eventually mailing the letter back to whoever started this chain letter in the first place. As with all chain letters, this is a really annoying method and rather problematic if it works since you'll get a lot of e-mails with duplicate names.

The second method is to set up a web site where people can enter their name and any other information. Relatively easy to set up, very stable, with the only problem being advertising the petition. But what does this accomplish? You didn't put any work into it, so it doesn't show that you care deeply. Web-based (and e-mail-based) petitions are relatively easy to spoof with lots of bogus names. In the end I don't think it sends any sort of message to whomever receives this petition.

To get something done -- like getting a product recalled or affecting the content of a magazine or tv show -- requires methods that show the people in control that there are people who care. There is a reason why a well written letter (or even a badly written letter) by a person is worth ten phone calls, which are worth 100 signatures on a petition.

It's all about the amount of effort that the person put into creating and sending his message. The higher the barrier, the less people who climb it, the more people they represent. Who ever takes the time to write a letter to a company? Barely anyone. Sure people may want to express their opinions, but a letter is quite a bit of effort so most people aren't impassioned enough to write a letter.

What I'm trying to get at is that you may have a hundred people that don't like something. But only one is willing to write about it, therefore that one letter represents a hundred complaints. Conversely, if people could just "think" of their complaint and have it be registered, then the hundred complaints would represent a hundred complaints.

My feeling is that a web petition will not move anybody to make any changes. Same thing for a web poll. It's too easy to vote, so each vote represents less people than other forms of getting an opinion. Worse, since there is no authentication mechanism (or poor ones like tallying by IP address), each vote probably represents less than one person.

So if I wanted to do something grand like get Doctor Who back on the air, without buying the rights to it and doing it myself, then what I would do is organize an old-fashioned letter campaign. Suggest what people can write about, the points they should bring up, the tone they're trying to convey, but don't give them a form letter that they just have to sign and send.

Get people to express their feelings and send in their letters. That has the best chance of working, from the man-on-the-street perspective. It's also very hard to do since people really don't want to bother with a cause if it involves any effort on their part. But that's why letter campaigns have a lot of weight.

A phone campaign can also work, but it's more specific. Problem with a phone call is that it's not recorded, so there is no record that all these people called about something. It does have some effect if a lot of people do it at once when the powers-that-be are listening. Although it does tend to attract people who just want to bitch, which can backlash against a cause.

Anyway, that's my feelings on popular causes.