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Want election updates? Don’t bet on the Net

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

Andrea Orr

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PALO ALTO: It was the first US presidential election since the Internet

became a mainstream source of breaking news, but many people seeking the latest

results in the nail-biting contest had more luck with an old-fashioned source of

information - television.

Election Day 2000 started with the Web site for the Republican National

Committee (http://www.rnc.org) featuring a

tirade against the party's presidential contender George W Bush, thanks to a

hacker, apparently a Democrat, who had broken in. The day drew to a close with

voters being blocked from accessing some of the most popular news destinations.

"You're seeing this page because MSNBC is experiencing high site

traffic," was the message that greeted many visitors to (http://www.MSNBC.com)

late in the day, as volumes of people logged on to see the latest tally.

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MSNBC, operated jointly by Microsoft Corp. and General Electric Co.'s NBC

television network, had promised full election news and more analyses than it

could provide on its affiliate television stations. But, it showed an uneven

performance for much of the evening.

People also complained about delays getting onto other popular news sites

like (http://www.CNN.com), (http://www.ABCNews.com)

and various political sites like (http://www.voter.com),

and said that some of the big Internet portals were slower than usual.

"It has been worse than I anticipated," said Dan Todd, spokesman

for Keynote Systems Inc. , which monitors Web site performance and found a long

list of sites from (http://www.votenader.com)

to (http://www.USAToday.com) that were

taking over 20 seconds to update Web pages at peak usage times.

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"There was clearly some degradation in the site performances," said

Todd. "They are certainly not meeting all their visitor expectations."

CNN Interactive President Scott Woelfel said CNN's election site was busy,

but had suffered no outages. He said the site was serving some 10 million pages

per hour, far eclipsing its earlier record.

"We've had extremely heavy traffic, as we anticipated. It is probably a

little bit higher than we thought it would be but under what we planned

for," Woelfel said. "We've seen no outages, and it's been going

smoothly."

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Web sites have frequently shown strain as key events from the death of

Princess Diana to the virtual Victoria's Secret fashion show drew unusually

large audiences. ABCNews.com said it broke its prior single-day site traffic

record by midday on Tuesday. (The old record had been set in 1998 when it posted

the Starr Report detailing President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky).

But many Internet users said they were surprised the Web continued to be so

unreliable after years of investment in the best technology.

Those who were able to log on without any onerous delays, however, said they

could not have been more pleased with all the information available, and with

some of the social aspects of the Net.

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One investment banker who joined colleagues after a conference in San Diego

to follow the late-breaking results online, described 25 people sitting around a

computer screen, and said it felt a little bit like the old days of radio.

"We've had a really engaged discussion in front of the machine because

we're not listening to the chattering of the talking heads on television,"

he said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.

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