While I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I briefly wandered in range of a cell phone tower and got a text message from my globetrotting brother, sent the night before. He said he might be going to w00tstock, and my response was not entirely kind. I’d been following the news about w00tstock — a three-night geek spectacular featuring Wil Wheaton, Paul and Storm, Adam Savage, and a range of special guests — since it was first announced. But since I live out on the East Coast, I didn’t, until that moment, know anyone who was actually going. I instantly went from being vaguely jealous of random, unknown people to being insanely jealous of my brother.

The awesome thing about w00tstock — aside from the fact that it happened — is that it was released under a Creative Commons license, and lots of technophiles were there. That means that if you, like me, were forced to resign yourself to living vicariously through your sibling instead of attending the show, you can still see a lot of what went on with minimal effort, like a search for w00tstock at YouTube.

In a move that’s almost but not quite entirely unlike the promotion of “Paranormal Activity,” Paul and Storm are also using Eventful to let fans demand w00tstock in their town. I say “unlike” because w00tstock was entirely a grassroots project, and “Paranormal Activity” already had a major distributor’s backing once it appeared on Eventful Demand. W00tstock, on the other hand, grew out of casual conversations Paul and Storm had with Adam Savage and Wil Wheaton, and news about the event spread almost entirely via blogs, Twitter and word of mouth among fans. Clicking “Demand It!” for “Paranormal Activity” felt like a marketing ploy; for w00tstock, it feels like an actual request. So my hat is off the 18 other people who have demanded w00tstock in Atlanta.

More on the tools used to spread the word:
How Twitter Works
How Blogs Work
How Facebook Works