] Keynote Systems, which regularly tests the response times
] of busy websites, said the responsiveness of BBC News
] Online suffered during the busy lunchtime period with
] average download times rising from 0.47 seconds to 1.88
] seconds.
]
] ITV News went through a more serious slowdown with
] average download times ballooning from 5.66 seconds to
] 15.84 seconds.
]
] As the conflict got under way, some sites such as that
] run by Arabic satellite TV broadcaster Al Jazeera were
] only intermittently available.
]
] The website of Britain's The Sun newspaper was also
] taking a long time to finish loading.
]
] Nic Newman, head of editorial development and technology
] at BBC News Online, said traffic to the site had already
] almost tripled and he expected it to grow further.
]
] Similar leaps in visitor numbers have been seen at the
] Yahoo and MSNBC news sites.
]
] According to Comscore Media Metrix, the top 15 news sites
] have seen traffic jump by more than 40%.

MemeStreams has been experiencing a steady increase in traffic since the 17th. We are currently up 166% [U: 66%, typo] for the period of the 17th thru 20th, vs 13th thru 16th. This is a mildly misleading statistic, as Saturday and Sunday are usually not very busy days. But no matter which way you slice it, we are experiencing a significant traffic increase. I'll post an update on this after I can compare a complete week.

Also of interest, "baghdad webcam" has very quickly become the top search term hitting the site, accounting for 5% of all search engine hits, and flying right past other "hot" search terms such as "ebonics translator", "isonews", and the everlasting "raver porn".

A quick visit to MSN's search engine shows that we are the top link for "baghdad webcam".. Good for us, bad for MSN users, as the page linked currently has absolutely nothing about webcams, let alone webcams in Iraq. The next link MSN search brings up is www.webcaminiraq.org, which was the link origionally on that page which caused MSN to index us as the top hit for that search term.. [shrug] I guess MSN's search engine isn't that smart. Or maybe it is, in a completely accidental way.. It is sending users to our "Current Events" top links page after all... :)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Iraq conflict hits websites hard

Cute *yum* raver *yum* girls *yum*

Raverporn.net | (RAVER + PORN) / RATTLE = SPOOGE

Gotta love that..

Raver Porn Perl

I thought this was entertaining, if nothing else.

RaverPorn, for better or for worse, was one of the first links ever recommended on MemeStreams. This was well over a year ago, back when recommending links was pretty much all you could do with MemeStreams, and a few of us were playing around with it to see how well it worked.

About 6-7 months ago I posted an update to the site that provided a unique url for each entry on the site which could be indexed by search engines. Eventually, the crawlers found their way into the site, and, or course, found RaverPorn.

As the search results have came back, it turns out that "raver porn password" has consistently been one of the Google search terms that results in the most hits for MemeStreams. This is a combination of the popularity of this search, the fact that most of the sites on the net that talk about Raver Porn use a lot of search engine manipulation techniques, which ironically lower their rank on Google versus sites like this one, and the fact that people looking for raver porn are pretty indiscriminate in their search for it.

So, at the end of the year I posted the 2002 MemeStreams site usage statistics. These statistics include the popular search terms that result in hits on this site. One of those search terms is "raver porn password."

Of course, this page was indexed by Google, and now shows up in searches for "raver porn password." The Google cache of this page is now the top Google cache hit for this site. Also, interestingly, people seem to be 3 to 4 times more likely to hit the Google cache of this page then to hit the actual page itself. (People searching for Raver Porn Passwords know that they are much more likely to find them in Google's cache then on an actual website.)

I thought that this was an interesting observation. It might be possible to build other kinds of search engine feedback loops... A page, or better, a network of pages, that adapt their content based on the search results they get, trying to maximize their hit count. What purpose this would serve I have no idea. Art?