Online power

This story, which just came out, reminded me a bit of what happened to the blogsite of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) at the height of the "Hello, Garci" scandal. "The PCIJ blog experienced download requests unprecedented in its three-month existence," wrote PCIJ online manager Alecks Pabico in the July 2005 issue of the PJR Reports, referring to the Hello, Garci tapes that can be downloaded in the blog.

"As the data transfer grew phenomenally each day, one of the servers where the files were stored was forced to shut down, unable to keep to its bandwidth limit," he wrote in his article "Blog Power in 2005."

BBC Online terror alert story gets over 3m page views by lunchtime
By: Oliver Luft
Source: Journalism.co.uk

After news broke of arrests made in the UK to foil a major terror plan BBC Online's lead story received over three million page views as people looked online for the latest developments.

Scotland Yard claimed that a plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" had been disrupted.

By lunchtime, as people eager to get the latest news on the day's events logged on, BBC Online's top story ‘Airlines Terror Plot’ disrupted had generated over 3.2million page views.

The figure far outweighed normal demand placed on the site. On average, a top story on the BBC News website generates a rough total of half-a-million page views.

By mid-afternoon the Have Your Say pages of the BBC News website had received nearly 2000 comments - with 500 posted and a further 1,300 waiting to be published.

BBC News also received more than 1000 emails from people submitting stories about their experiences at airports up and down the country as the corporation deployed its own correspondents at key sites to offer rolling TV and web coverage via News 24.

For the first time ITV used its 24-hour breaking news team - similarly with reporters stationed up and down the country - to report live from airports as news broke across the country.