Hours after one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, hundreds of bloggers directed their readers to charities accepting donations for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, inundating sites like
RedCross.org and SalvationArmy.org with traffic and donors.
According to numbers from Nielsen//NetRatings, traffic at RedCross.org surged 184 percent from August 30 to August 31, jumping
from 390,000 unique visitors to more than 1.1 million. The 1.1 million unique visitors to RedCross.org was roughly equal to the number of visitors for the entire month of December 2004, during the
Southeast Asian tsunami disaster relief effort, Nielsen's report said. As of Friday, $110 million had been received in online donations, out of a $197 million outpouring of public support, according
to a Red Cross spokeswoman.
Intelliseek's Blogpulse tool shows the blogosphere buzzing about aid efforts since the storm made landfall. 3.01 percent of all blog posts on Thursday were related to
the hurricane, and .014 percent of all blog posts mentioned or linked to RedCross.org--up from .001 percent on Wednesday, and representing an increase of almost fifteen times. The Salvation Army
experienced a similar spike in buzz, going from .031 percent on Thursday to .232 percent of blog posts on Thursday, and representing an increase of seven and a half times.
According to a report
by Keynote, the influx of traffic from concerned citizens significantly slowed the response times of the sites' host servers--the research company's measurements, taken from the 25 biggest U.S.
cities, show the sites as "only sporadically available" from 7:00 a.m. to noon both on Thursday and Friday.
One blog, the TruthLaidBear.com, has instituted a donation registration program, which
tracks contributions made by donors who were referred to sites by bloggers, or who are bloggers themselves. As of Friday, the site had tracked $430,203 contributors so far, referred by 1,453 blogs.
The contributions tracked by TLB range from $1 to $5,000, and the numbers increase as quickly as one can click "refresh."
The top-referring site is law professor Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit,
which has secured $89,595 as of Friday, with 480 contributors. Reynolds' post directing readers to donate to the Red Cross or a list of several other charities was the most-linked-to blog post on
Thursday, according to Intelliseek.