Not to get into the political battle that is occurring in Egypt but I wonder how the organization of both news gathering agencies and organizers would have fared had they been using StatusNet software (the software that supports identi.ca) on a local computer inside the country instead of utilizing Twitter servers that were located outside Egypt. When the Egyptian governmentremoved their BGP routers from the Internet they essentially left the Egyptian Internet as an intranet which would have allowed communications within the country.

Just thinking out loud...