The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Chairs

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Chairs

The Good

Wow.  Just Wow at the reaction.  I never imagined that Empty Chair Day would sweep the nation, take over Twitter, make its way to the banner headline at Drudge and stories at The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. (added) Michael Patrick Leahy has details on the press coverage and how even the DNC was infiltrated.

There obviously is a deep grassroots desire to be heard and to be heard against Obama.

The flood of photos sent to me and posted on Facebook and Twitter speaks volumes to what is not being picked up in the polls and mainstream media.  Anyone who thought we were not motivated has missed the picture completely.

While we should not be overly confident, I think I can see 2010 from my empty lawn chair.

Another good thing was that the rollout showed how we can harness social media as a motivating format, and the role even itsy bitsy part-time blogs can play in providing the missing link.

As readers know, this whole shebang started with a reader tip to me Saturday Night, my spotting a handful of tweets about it, some very timely efforts linking to me by Prof. Glenn Reynolds and Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart.com, and off it went.  Others picked up on it either from those links or independently, and before you knew it, within about 24 hours its viral.

And all it took was that missing link connecting a reader to a small blog to bigger blogs who have the megaphones necessary to get the word out.

The role of lighting a fire and then seeing others fan the flames is one I’ve come to cherish here.

The Bad

I was unable to handle the flow of photos submitted.  When I conceived the idea, I figured I’d get 20-30 photos.

Instead, beginning last night I received over 100 until I started posting announcements mid-morning telling people not to submit any more, but they kept coming.  So fewer than half of the photos I received have been posted.  I just don’t have the time to do it, and for that I apologize.  I need to think about a better way of doing this next time (not a big fan of Facebook pages).

The server was built to withstand a Cat 2 traffic hurricane.  But today was a Cat 4.  By the time Drudge linked around 9:45 or so, we already had been linked by Instapundit, Lucianne, dozens of blogs, Facebook pages, and hundreds if not thousands of tweets.  Traffic already was flowing at 10,000+ per hour when Drudge hit.

We easily handled a Drudge link in May which for over an hour threw 1000 visits per minute, but today it was just too much on top of everything else, and we crashed and burned for 30 minutes until Ed could make some adjustments.  By the time we fixed the problem Drudge had changed the link to Twitter and then Politico, so we probably missed a couple hundred thousand visits.  You know I don’t care about losing 200,000+ visits, it means nothing to me, and I hardly give it a thought.

So, adding to the ever increasing cost of preparing for the worst case scenario, we have increased server capacity again.  I’m hoping we will need it tomorrow.

The Ugly

A blogger’s got to know his limitations.  And today I hit mine.

Tomorrow I’ll need your help in spreading (shhh, it’s still a secret) far and wide.

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