The Unemployed Online

In an earlier era, the unemployed stood in line to apply for benefits, offering a photogenic image of hard times. These days, they mostly file online. Less visible from the street, they now show up on Facebook.

Coming from many different walks of life and often embarrassed by their plight, the unemployed have often found it hard to organize on their own behalf. This may change as they find it easier to connect to one another.

The increasing average duration of unemployment is generating anger and frustration.

While the lame-duck Congress approved an extension of some benefits as part of the tax-cut deal in December, the so-called 99ers, who reach their maximum 99 weeks of benefits, are ineligible for further assistance.

Right now the many Web sites that beckon to the jobless look like a microcosm of the larger Web, peppered with silliness, superfluities and scams, along with useful information.

Job seekers can click on a list of 100 inspiring activities for the unemployed, learn what to look for in a résumé distribution service, or listen to a videotaped protest song invoking Santa Claus. www.dominicanflash.com

But they can also find moving personal accounts of futile efforts to find jobs and lists of elected officials making key votes on benefit extensions. Many Web sites also raise sharp political issues regarding job-creation policies. The National Employment Law Project, a pro-labor advocacy group, addresses a wide range of issues – including the increasingly long-term nature of unemployment – at UnemployedWorkers.org.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. and its community affiliate Working America maintain UnemploymentLifeline.org as part of a larger effort to help rally and organize the unemployed. The International Association of Machinists has created the Union of the Unemployed, or UCubed, urging the unemployed to multiply their economic and political power.

The Web site offers a free “Hire Us, America” bumper sticker, as well as a 21-point political plan that starts with a call for a public jobs program.

Among many efforts to monitor and discuss unemployment trends is The Layoff List initiated by a guy named Mike in upstate New York.

Some people’s hopes that anger about unemployment would help the Democrats in the midterm elections were not borne out, but extension of unemployment benefits remains an intensely partisan issue.

Ironically, the extension of unemployment benefits may have done more to blunt political outrage than to discourage job search.

If the number of 99ers left in the lurch continues to grow, however, more of them may line up together – both online and off.