After the launch of the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Life, media attention (see the Nature story with comments attached) drove so much traffic to the site that it crashed (AP, whose headline I have stolen; Techshout).

The encyclopedia’s website logged 11.5 million hits over 5.5 hours, including two hours of down time, according to the site organisers.

This amusing point has generated even more press… will that too take down the site? It was live and well, if slow, when I checked today. Let’s all check and see what happens.

I still find it amazing when over-popularity ‘breaks’ a site. We experienced this ourselves with our eye-catching story on ‘How to make a zombie cockroach’, which apparently many, many people could not resist clicking. Who can blame them. (We’ve made it free again for 4 days so you can try to crash us again).

Meanwhile, some knowledgeable bloggers are putting together detailed critiques about the ‘encyclopedia’ (iPhylo; bbgm)