The power of the Weblogs - Blogging Mt Everest

How 2 links at Kottke and The Presurfer grew to 840 links and 200.000 visitors in 24 days

In januar after featuring the panorama from the Roof of Japan I started to look for other tops of the world to show.

Of course Mt Everest was the No 1 on this list. I discovered that this year was the 50 year anniversary of the first climb of everest by Hillary and Tenzing and this made me sure that I wanted to show a panorama from the Top of the World in the week of the anniversary.

Only one panorama exists as far as I know. Roddy Mackenzie made it with a Widelux camera in 1989 7 years before Quicktime VR was introduced.

It took me 3 months before I got in contact with Roderick Mackenzie and got his permission to show it.

Saturday May 24 was the 14 year anniversary of his visit at the top and that day was perfect to put it online. I expected to get it promoted and indexed in Google before the great anniversary day May 29. I knew that the whole week, TV, Newspapers and other medias would focus on the anniversary.

A newsletter was sent to about 20 weblogs and other medias during the first days.

Only 2 of them actually reacted and published the link.

My favorite Blogger Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing whom I like to thank for all her links to Panoramas.dk (and other VR sites) unfortunately did not get my mail in time. MY fault using wrong mail address.

The Presurfer - Gerard Vlemming in Netherland was first (again). His link was online from Saturday morning.

The Top Of The World.
View a 360 degree panorama from the top of Mount Everest. The image was taken by Roderick Mackenzie on May 24, 1989. This and many more beautiful pictures at Hans Nyberg's Panorama site.

Kottke in New York made a link in his remainder links just saying:

Panoramic shot from the top of Mount Everest

Kirkaracha at Metafilter posted the link which he had found at Kottke.

Panoramic view from top of Everest (requires QuickTime) [via kottke.org ] posted by kirkaracha at 2:02 PM PST -

With comments like this it just had to be a succes.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Jordon cooper was next saying

This is the greatest Apple Quick Time panorama that I have seen.

Gen Kanai weblog Oh my god...amazing. Amazing!

And so it went on and on:

pinseri

Synthetic Morpheme

Brain Off

Top Down

Spare Rib

bound.dk

Newbornstranger

nicholasjon.com

Andrew Raff

Katherine's Blog

Ministry of Propaganda

Memeufacture

Carisenda

Teller

Ron's Log

No Sense Of Place

Newton's Apocalypse

Idle Type

cloudtravel

Blue Dawn

The Crayfish Says Go!

Mehul blogs !

brindo

Anorakish

Sunday evening Mt Everest had reached the top of Blogdex

Monday it was also no 1 in Daypop

And late Tuesday No 1 in Popdex

For a couple of hours it was No 1 in all 3 indexes and No 4 in 2 additional indexes the blogosphere.us and the breakingblogs.com

At this time a lot of News sites, linksites and Forums had found the site and linked to it. Most of them directly to the Everest Panorama.

The week before the Everest, panoramas.dk had 9.192 unique user sessions.

On the day of the Anniversary panoramas.dk recorded 19.333 unique user sessions. Friday 27.055. 600-700 people was always online downloading QTVR movies of 1-2 mb size. Fortunately everything worked.

The whole week ended with 107.117 visits.

From May 24 to June 17 panoramas.dk has had 230.860 visits.

More than 125.000 views on the Everest panorama and a total of 400.000 fullscreen QTVR has been viewed.

AllTheWeb has indexed 840 pages Linking to Mt Everest (June 17)

And it all started with 2 links at Kottke and The Presurfer

Of the regular news pages i sent my newsletter to none published the link.