A Pigeon, A Line and...
by Smith on 2009/09/10
Ed’s Note: If you haven't been following the epic journey of Winston the Pigeon - where have you been? The media are going nuts talking about his heroic win. He's managed to write us something in between his many media appearances – (i.e. the Pigeon is FAMOUS). Below a brief report – but you can look forward to a more detailed case study when the bird finally gets a chance to breathe.
Winston landed safe and sound in Hillcrest as the valiant winner against the ADSL line.
Winston delivered the data in a winning time of 2:06:57, with the ADSL line only delivering 100 meg in the same time.
The Internet is ablaze with Winston fever and feathers have been sent flying everywhere! Ironically, the Pigeon Race 2009 website burnt through 4gb of data in 10 hours during the night, causing some chaos at The Unlimited company.
| Item | Before ( 7/09/09) | After (10/09/09) |
| Pigeon Race 2009 Uniques Visitors | 1017 | 21528 |
| Face Book Fans | 18 | 2467 |
| Twitter Followers | 87 | 374 |
| YouTube Views | 487 | 2108 |
The mainline news media have taken the story and run with it. We are getting reports of coverage in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
On News24, South Africa’s biggest news portal, the story became the most read and the most emailed story yesterday.
This morning, Winston was on East Coast Radio, 5 FM and Radio Algoa! TV coverage included SABC3 and ETV.
Google News is reporting 95 news stories from Business Report, ITWEB, The Daily Mail, Reuters, and Yahoo News.
A Google search is showing 81700 results, up from 24000 last night.
It’s too much for a pigeon to bear!
*Update:
On the BBC here!
On Mashable here! (Their latest tweet: "Our most retweeted post right now: "CARRIER PIGEONS: Still Faster Than ADSL" - http://bit.ly/QgCMf")
The Times: here!
On Engadget here!
On Techmeme!
BrandsEye is being used to track the story (yay) but we know you're all on the look out - so do share what you find (offline particularly)!
If you wrote about it add your links too :).
