NEW YORK • What began as a small group of protesters expressing their grievances about economic inequities last month from a park in New York City has evolved into an online conversation that is spreading across the country on social media platforms.

Inspired by the populist message of the group known as Occupy Wall Street, more than 200 Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have sprung up in dozens of cities in the past week, seeking volunteers for local protests and fostering discussion about the group's concerns.

Some 900 events have been set up on Meetup.com, and blog posts and photos are popping up on the WeArethe99Percent blog on Tumblr from people who see themselves as victims of not just a sagging economy but economic injustice.

"I don't want to be rich. I don't want to live a lavish lifestyle," said a woman on Tumblr, describing herself as a college student worried about the burden of student debt. "I'm worried. I'm scared, thinking about the future shakes me. I hope this works. I really hope this works."

The online conversation has grown at the same time that street protests have taken place in several other cities last week, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington. A website, Occupy Together, is trying to aggregate the online conversations and the off-line activities.

"We are not coordinating anything," said Justin Wedes, 26, a former high school science teacher from Brooklyn who helps manage one of the movement's main Twitter accounts, @OccupyWallStreetNYC. "It is all grass-roots. We are just trying to use it to disseminate information, tell stories, ask for donations and to give people a voice."

While people in New York are still dominating the conversation on Twitter, almost half of the posts were made in other parts of the country, primarily in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, as well as Texas, Florida and Oregon, according to an analysis of Twitter data Friday by Trendrr, a social media analytics firm.

Mark Ghuneim, founder and chief executive officer of Trendrr, said the Twitter conversation was producing an average of 10,000 to 15,000 posts an hour Friday about Occupy Wall Street, with most people sharing links from news sites, Tumblr, YouTube and Trendsmap.

"This is more of a growing conversation than something massive as we have seen from hurricanes and with people passing away," Ghuneim said. "The conversation for this has a strong and steady heartbeat that is spreading. We're seeing the national dialogue morph into pockets of local and topic-based conversation."

In Egypt, the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page was started 10 months before the uprising in January to protest police brutality. The page had more than 400,000 members before it was used to help propel protesters into Tahrir Square. Occupy Wall Street's Facebook page began a few weeks ago and has 138,000 members.