As a supporter and aficionado of animals (especially puppies!), I was really looking forward to the release of the new "Encyclopedia of Life" (www.eol.org) site.  As it happens, a surge of community interest caused the site to crash and burn when it was released earlier this week.  Read this:

While it has taken almost a year, the non-profit Encyclopedia of Life project launched yesterday. It gained so much attention, that the site quickly crashed. It went back online Tuesday afternoon (EST), but went down again the next morning.

During five-and-a-half hours, the site logged 11.5 million hits, including visitors who reached the "503 error".

"What's strange about this is that the sites for the Ashy Titmouse, White Booby, and Alaskan Vaginawolf accounted for 98% of all eof.org  internet traffic on the first day," said Paula Kinderman, EOF's tech project lead.  "I just don't understand that at all.  Perhaps there's a surge of research regarding those particular species."