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Is the BBC's World Cup blog the new Slashdot for football sites?

Written by Martin Belam
Published 2 June, 2006
Categories: BBC, Football, YouTube

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4 comments so far
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One of the disadvantages/advantages of living in Greece is that I don't get to watch England friendlies anymore (delete according to whether we are turning over Hungary or being humiliated by Australia) which means I didn't get to see Peter Crouch's inexplicable robot dancing this week.

I did though get to witness the aftershocks on the internet. The BBC Sport World Cup Blog linked through to a site that had some video of Peter Crouch dancing, and promoted it on the front page.

That immediately crushed AnfieldRed in a Slashdot traffic surge style.

AnfieldRed is experiencing issues due to the popularity of an article featured on the BBC website, we will resume full service shortly
In the meantime those looking for the Crouch robot video can see it above

Fairplay to the Liverpool fan site, they were using You Tube which kept the video up-and-running, and kept the site up. Of course, if they'd opted to use Revver.com to host the video instead, they might have made some money from it as well ;-)

The actual video of him dancing during the game can be found here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXQzVXWMfjo

Posted by Martin Belam, June 2, 2006
Read the latest posts about: BBC, Football, YouTube
The views expressed on currybetdotnet are my own, and do not reflect the views of Guardian News and Media Limited, or any current or former clients or employers. Read my blogging principles
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4 comments so far

AnfieldRed commented on June 4, 2006:

I help out with the backend and admin side of AnfieldRed - I've been on the receiving end of big traffic before on other sites (more Digg than Slashdot) so when I saw it hit the BBC front page I knew we'd have issues ;)

The site had over 1000 sessions on at one point, even with caching and throttling our host pulled the plug so I had no choice but to throw a HTML page up.

The traffic has only just died down but as a relatively new and small site we can't go and get a dedicated box ;)

I might write up the traffic at some point but I imagine getting linked off the beeb football homepage on the run up to the worldcup could maybe even surpass a /.ing ;)

Janey C commented on June 8, 2006:

Hey all,
I would like you all to help "Make Football History" by means of this site:

http://www.fluent2.com/england/

You can use the site to generate a small support banner to show your support
for football and the site will automatically link back to you. You can include the banner on all your websites.

Lets help England make Football history!

Thank you
Janey
xxx

Martin Belam replied on June 9, 2006:

I'm so disappointed - when I saw Janey C's comment I thought I was going to get to a 'Make Football History' site like 'Make Bono History' which would have been much funnier ;-)

http://www.shotdeadinthehead.com/products/info.php?products_id=76&wx=1024&wy=577

Janey commented on June 18, 2006:

Sorry to disapoint you Martin ;-)

Yeah, lets make Mr Bono histoty! hehehe

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