Whatever their cause, supporters say it's exciting and gratifying to see the number of signatures on their petitions grow throughout the days and weeks they've been in cyberspace. "There's nothing like seeing those numbers come up," said Fred Santino, who put up a petition free of charge on PetitionOnline.com last week. "It's serving its purpose and it's getting the names."

Santino said he lost his wife to colon cancer in May 2001. Although she was not able to get the experimental cancer drug Erbitux, he and others are now asking ImClone Systems Inc. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., an ImClone partner, to make the drug, which has not won regulatory approval, available to cancer patients through a compassionate use program.

In the two weeks or so since the petition went up, the list of signatures has grown to more than 750 with no special publicity. Santino said that number was reached solely by word of mouth and e-mail. "I've been around the Internet a while and I don't see that we could ever go back to trying to fight things on our own," said Santino, who teaches Information Technology at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. "Because of the Internet, the world's gotten a lot smaller."

To be sure, Santino said he is aware that an online petition isn't the only thing that needs to be done. After collecting even more signatures -- he said he doesn't yet know how many -- he plans to print them all out and deliver them to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ImClone, Bristol-Myers and U.S. Congressional representatives to help plead his case.

"I don't think the petition on its own is very viable," Santino said. "It's up to people to go out and publicize it." So, after thousands of "signatures" are gathered in an online campaign, what happens then? Do they really work? Moreover, there is the question of who is behind an online petition and why.

"The biggest question with regard to online petitions, however, is who is sponsoring them and why. This is where it gets a little slippery," says the website TruthOrFiction.com in a section devoted to online petitions, adding that in some cases it may be a way for individuals or companies to put together marketing mailing lists. Moreover, there's something to be said about good, old-fashioned paper petitions.

"The biggest problem with e-mail petitions is that they do not really carry the weight of a personally signed petition," TruthOrFiction.com writes. Paper petitions carry more weight because real people have signed with real signatures and, presumably, real addresses. In light of these concerns, there's even been an online petition petitioning the petition Web site to stop posting online petitions.

"Online petitions have no effect on the real world," reads the petition on PetitionOnline.com, whose authors did not identify themselves. "Any person with access to a computer can easily create a petition full of thousands of fake and/or stolen names." So far, that petition had garnered 246 "signatures."

© Reuters