As it happens, Mr. Zuckerman said, the Iranian government’s censorship task has been made harder because there is a thriving blogging community there, which he attributes to an earlier Iranian censorship campaign against traditional print media, in 2003. Writers flocked to the Internet. This fact, combined with a history of blocking access to social media tools since at least 2004, means that a large group of computer-savvy communicators “have had five years to figure out” how to get their message out.

They have learned about all manner of “proxies,” that is, improvised ways of evading censorship — often connecting to a computer outside of Iran, which then can connect to the Internet freely. In earlier cases, the important news that bloggers had to share on a social network might have related to soccer, or a certain favorite pet, but today those same tools are used to get the word out about protests and a spirit of defiance within Iran.

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From his experience as a founder of Global Voices, an aggregator of citizen media from around the world, Mr. Zuckerman says he has learned to value the roots laid down by a community of bloggers.

In Kenya, he said, bloggers were important commentators and reporters in 2007-8 on a disputed election, and people would ask why there were so many bloggers in Kenya.

It turned out, he said, that “Kenya has the second-most bloggers in Africa and that mostly they are not writing about politics; many are writing about rugby.” There was, he said, “a fascinating latent capacity — people who knew how to use the tools, knew how to write well, to tell a story with words and pictures.”

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The Russia-Georgia war, he said, offered a contrast.

“Suddenly a bunch of people flocked to blogging tools,” he said. “We had never heard about of lot of those people. A number of people were manufacturing blogs from whole cloth for propaganda purposes. It was hard to know who they were, if they were credible. In Kenya, we knew who they were; we knew their favorite rugby team.”

There are practical benefits to the mainstreaming of political protest online. It presents another barrier to censorship.

Mr. Zuckerman said there had been discussion about having a dedicated human rights site — “and we realized that it will be the most attacked site in the world,” he said.

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“The response,” he said, “is to say let’s go in the other direction — encourage anyone that has a human rights site to mirror it everywhere, including sites like Blogspot.com with lots of noncontroversial sites. It is kind of hard for Iran to block Blogger.com well, not that it is hard, but it is complicated. They would have close down a lot of blogs, including blogs with cute cats.”

Beyond the practical benefits, there is something satisfying about a country being assisted by ordinary bloggers who suddenly show their skills in organizing and belief in basic political principles. It harks back to heroes like the Roman leader Cincinnatus, a farmer who had to be persuaded to lead the republic in a time of need and after succeeding quickly returned to the farm. Any functioning society needs professional politicians, just as any modern society needs political blogs, but it is good to be reminded that leadership and political voices can come from other ranks.

But, Mr. Zuckerman reminded me, “You have to have the sword at home. You don’t want to have to buy a sword at the last minute.”