You may remember a post a few weeks ago, telling you about the 2,996 Project (see the graphic “Join The Tribute” at right). Dale Roe (the project’s founder) set out to sign up a blog to honor each of the 2,996 victims of 9/11 with a web tribute. All 2,996 tributes would be unveiled on 9/11/2006 — the fifth anniversary of that awful day.
I signed up about two months ago, when just a few hundred blogs had signed up. Dale has been out publicizing the project, and the blogs have been regularly signing up. Just a few days ago, we looked at the rate of signups and — with some satisfaction — concluded that we were likely to have every victim assigned to a blogger before 9/11/2006.
Yesterday something happened that dramatically changed the dynamics of the project: Michelle Malkin signed up to do a tribute, and publicized it on her very popular blog. The result was a “Michelle-o-lanche” — a flash flood of people reading Michelle’s post and clicking over to the 2,996 Project’s web site. And hundreds of these visitors signed right up to honor a 9/11 victim.
The chart above shows what this did to my web site’s traffic. You’re seeing a graph of bandwidth consumption — basically just the number of bits per second that my web server is spitting out. You can see exactly when Michelle mader her post, about 11:30 yesterday morning — because the bandwidth consumption immediately jumped right up to the max (about 340,000 bits per second). At one point I had over 1,000 people simultaneously using my web server, by far the most I’ve ever had on my little site. The result of all this (aside from the wonderfully high rate of 2,996 Project signups) is that my web site was very slow yesterday.
And this morning, the traffic is starting to pick back up, already at nearly the high rates of yesterday. So…until things settle down a bit, I’m going to lay off any more posts on my blog (which is on the same web server), in the hopes of freeing up some more bandwidth for the project.
Oh, and if you’re a blogger, and you haven’t signed up yet, then get theeself over to the 2,996 Project and sign up right now!
