If American colonists were launching their rebellion against England today, Paul Revere could have spared his poor horse a lather. Instead of riding out to every Middlesex village and farm, he would have just posted the alert on his Web site, britishRcoming.com.

As we know today, a lot of patriots wouldn’t have been sure whether to reach for their muskets or keep their nightshirts on rather than get all worked up over a hoax. Still, they couldn’t have said they weren’t warned.

In 2006, although our independence is pretty well settled, we still need to rally the common folk sometimes. And despite its reputation for mischief and misinformation, the Web can be an effective if sometimes clumsy tool.

Just ask the bloggers at Porkbusters.org.

It’s all about a bill by Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, who wanted to put more details about federal spending in the hands of Americans. Coburn, with co-sponsorship from Democrat Sen. Barrack Obama of Illinois, wants the federal government to establish a searchable database that would allow Americans to track all federal grants and contracts.

That, Coburn and Obama figured, would make it more likely that obscure pork-barrel expenditures, buried deep in omnibus appropriations bills, could be rooted out by a concerned public and examined on their individual merits. Senate majority leaders Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., gave the measure their bipartisan backing.

In the tradition of the Senate, however, somebody exercised his privilege to put a hold on the bill and keep it from going to the floor. Who it was wasn’t explained because, again in the tradition of the Senate, he kept his name secret. In all, not a strong endorsement for openness and accountability.

That’s when the bloggers went to work, beginning with Porkbusters.org, which deputized the nation to begin interrogating all 100 senators. The appeal went out for citizens to ask their own senators, flat out, if they were or weren’t behind the mysterious hold. As the replies came back, Porkbusters.org kept an online scorecard, tabulating who had and who had not denied responsibility for the hold.

It took only a few days for the culprit — two of them, actually — to be revealed. No surprises to learn that Republican Sen. Ted “Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens of Alaska and West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, the record holder for bacon brought home, were behind the hold.

Byrd and Stevens have harrumphed unconvincing explanations that they just wanted time to study the measure. What a coincidence. That’s what citizens want to do with federal grants and contracts.