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October 06, 2004
The Pessimist
I'm not in a very good mood today. I left work sick this morning, proceeded to take a three hour nap, and am now starving. So, I have decided to be grumpy. One small bit of cheer is something I heard online today about last night's Vice Presidential debates (which I did not watch). Dick Cheney apparently urged viewers to go to factcheck.com to get "the truth" when he in fact meant to send them to factcheck.org. Here's a brief excerpt from the Wall Street Journal about the comical results:
FactCheck.com is owned by Name Administration Inc., a Cayman Islands company that engages in so-called "domain parking" -- it acquires discarded Web sites and monetizes the traffic with text advertising. The site had been showing education-related ads, mostly for online-degree programs, when Mr. Cheney mentioned the site during the debate. Suddenly, Name Administration saw a surge in traffic -- about 50,000 unique visitors in the first hour -- which costs the company money for Internet bandwidth, according to John Berryhill, Name Administration's attorney.
....So employees redirected traffic to the Soros site, not because of any request nor payment from Mr. Soros's organization or supporters, but based on their own political viewpoints, Mr. Berryhill said. "Individuals within the company are favorably disposed to George Soros's political point of view," said Mr. Berryhill.
As of writing this, I have not been able to get on factcheck.org, but it has apparently already posted an article covering the mixup.
Posted by mwashburn at October 6, 2004 02:55 PMPosted to self reflection
Comments
i suspect both websites will be thoroughly bogged down for a day or three as everybody and their uncles try to check them out.
Posted by: adam at October 6, 2004 04:49 PM