“For me it’s second nature,” says Balliett of social networking. “It’s my job. I think: Need to organize an event? Use the Internet. Throw a party? Use Evite. Technology offers a platform on which to hold the conversation. It’s also given a platform for us to rally together and organize.”

“Join the Impact” “was not set up to hit Number 1 in Google,” says the search-engine-optimizer by day and activist by night. She wasn’t really prepared for how quickly the site would explode.

Seattle hosting site HostDango eventually donated a dedicated server to the cause, and webmasters from Wetpaint.com created a sister site for “Join the Impact” to allow users to connect directly with the growing list of organizers.

“Most of the traffic was driven to the site directly from these emails and postings on blogs,” she says. And since so many of these messages were now being distributed on local levels across the U.S., readers were not clear as to the source.

It became the week’s great mystery.

By Monday, amid increasing hits to “Join the Impact,” and plans to gather at city halls all over the country, gay communities from coast to coast began to ask: Who is behind this website?

Raised by a Methodist minister and a nurse, 26-year-old Cleveland-native Amy Balliett is about as earnest and post-ironic as they come.

After her stint at nearby Cleveland State University, like so many post-collegians, she eventually landed in Seattle. These days, her day job is in search engine optimizing. In her free time, the Emerald City music scene feeds her soul. In fact, it was music that brought her to the love of her life.

“I’m a musician… but she’s an amazing musician,” says Balliett of Jessica Trejo, a fellow Seattle singer-songwriter. “I had an ego until I met her.”

A few years ago, Balliett talked Cafe Racer into letting her put together a show, ironically, a Bitter Valentine’s Day concert. Trejo was one of the dozen or so attendees.

Within weeks, the pair began dating, and after a year, Balliett proposed. Needless to say, the news of Prop 8’s passing was personal.

“It’s ludicrous,” she fumes, “that after 10 months of the right to marry, they had their rights taken away. When there are no legal binding rights to a commitment, that commitment loses credibility.

“When we’re backed into a corner,” she continues, “as we have been with these propositions, we cannot let ourselves be silenced. Protest is a way to bring that conversation back to a national level.”

Ironically, taking the conversation to a national level is exactly what proponents of the ballot measures did, tapping into the social networking wealth of organized religion. Much of their victory is credited to last minute Mormon and Catholic collaboration, as well as the church segment of the wide African-American turn-out for Barack Obama.

But Balliett insists that polarizing the debate will solve nothing.

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