Welcome to the Internet, US House of Representatives

According to CNN.com, The release of the proposed bailout plan online resulted in its site being overwhelmed with traffic, followed by literally millions of e-mails being sent to addresses on the house.gov website. With internet use more and more ubiquitous in this country, governement servers weren't quite prepared on an issue where everyone had an opinion. "Digital traffic cops" have since been installed to manage traffic and only let a certain people on the site at a time.

Now, when specific pages begin to reach their limits, citizens receive a message asking them to "try back later." There was apparently very little drop in web traffic today, even with the Rosh Hashanah holiday. Jeff Ventura, who appears to be the chief resident IT guy, said that this was a much higher level of traffic than after 9/11 Commission report was publicly released online, which was the previous high he had seen. As for the number of e-mails, he said, "We know it's in the millions, but we haven't counted yet, because when you're about to get hit by a tidal wave, you don't count the drops of water in the wave." Kay.

As more and more US citizens begin to live more and more of their lives online, the government has, sensibly, tried to do as much of its business online as possible. It's cheaper, and people don't have to be mobile to deal with it. However, for that system to work, the government has to run its online operations effectively. In my capacity working for the Ohio state government, I have often run into cases where people ran into technological snags while trying to take care of essentials. Now the government can't be responsible for people's home systems (which I'm sure is the actual problem much of the time), but it has to at least be able to anticipate demand in certain situations or else this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The bailout issue is a specific issue that has brought up the strongest electorate opinions since the start of the Iraq War. It's certainly the first time since then that I have seen widespread street protests around the country. It's strange to think how much things have changed since that time. The internet 2.0 has really hit the mainstream in the interim. While many sites have been around since 2002, it is in the time since then that we have seen the rise of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc., as well as perhaps an even greater phenomenon: the point where the internet became a pretty much essential part of life.

I have seen several local newspaper stories recently concerning how libraries are rushing to add internet capacity to keep up with demand, as those without their own connections still have some things they have to do online. I head to the library about once a week. My local branch has at least thirty computers available with internet access, and when I go there in the 5pm hour, all or nearly all of the computers are in use.

So, the upshot is, when we now come to an issue everybody's got an opinion on, and feels personally affected by, the e-mails being sent to our government officials are going to number in the millions rather than thousands. Not only do the servers have to be beefed up, but my heart goes out to the person whose job it is to read all of them.

In other news, I have CNN on in the background, and they've actually sent somebody to the one tiny town in Alaska where you can see Russia from your house.