Over the weekend, there’s been what tentatively appears to be a stolen election in Iran, followed by protests with estimates of six or seven figures. Sadly, the news networks pretty much ignored the story (at least, up until the New York Times criticized them for doing so).

Top coverage of the event in America, it turns out, has come from the bloggers: Andrew Sullivan on the left, and Hugh Hewitt on the right being good examples (and normally these two are at each other’s throats). Without the bloggers, the issue would be almost invisible to us here in the west.

Of course, Andrew Sullivan isn’t in Iran, so most of his reporting comes from watching Twitter. It turns out that Twitter was one of the few means of communication that the Iran government left up on election day, and the populace took advantage.

With the absence of text messaging and mobile services — both were cut off across the country on and around election day and were still blocked on Sunday — Twitter proved to be the most reliable communication technique between people inside Iran and millions of others on the outside thirsty for any update.

Facebook also is coming up a lot:

candidates’ pages remain a main source of information for updates and breaking news. In fact we’ve seen many cases of news breaking on Facebook first while confirmation came later, including Moussavi’s house arrest and Ahmadinejad’s planned addresses.

If the people’s revolution is successful, it will be hard for the history books to talk about what happened without mentioning the role of social networking software.