The media ecosystem continued to digest the story of Canadian sf writer Peter Watts's border macedown and arrest last week, with some new spikes of blog activity, and much discussion on threads across multiple sites.

Watts posted a request for a possible witness to contact his legal team. According to Watts, one of the commenters on his site indicated that they saw the event.

The major media pickup yesterday was the political blog Crooks and Liars, which featured the Watts story front page (Until the ongoing craziness in DC pushed it below the fold).

The Facebook group, Against the arrest and beating of Peter Watts, was up to 1,293 members and dozens of posts. There's a bit of trolling/flaming, but also some reasonable dialogue, and a couple of heavy hitters like Kathryn Cramer and David Brin weighing in.

The blogosphere continues to bubble, with a Google search now returning over 6K hits. There's too much good stuff to keep up with and read through it all, but you can click almost anywhere in the search results and you'll find people in thoughtful and passionate discussion.

PZ Myers post at Pharyngula has sparked an active discussion thread. Noted sf author Michael Swanwick has an eloquent post on his blog, Flogging Babel, which focuses on the tail-end of the incident, where police dumped Watts across the bridge in Canada without his coat. Do-Ming Lum has a good wrap at Luminosis.

And supporter Chris Knall put up a information/donations site FreeTheSquid.org, which provides a quick way of locating the PayPal and snail mail donation options. (Watts's pal David Nickle gave the site a shout-out in a post yesterday, so you know it's legit.)

And I'll say it again — if you haven't read Watt's work, you can go check it out on his site, where there's a Big Friendly Button to make donations. As soon as I got my paycheck on Tuesday, I sent what I could, Hope you'll consider doing the same.

Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and colleague.