US workers flood election websites

The nail biting US presidential election has caused workers to down tools and watch events unfold on the web, according to a nationwide poll released yesterday.

Careers website Vault.com surveyed 151 workers and found that nearly 72 per cent of them said that the recount in Florida and other related activities have impaired their productivity at work.

Employees were either busy visiting news sites (91 per cent), chatting about the elections with fellow workers (88 per cent), emailing or phoning others (73 per cent), or failing to arrive at work on time after late-night viewing (42 per cent).

Not surprisingly, the internet is the most popular tool for monitoring the election, and related websites are enjoying increased traffic. CNN.com dominated with more than four million unique visitors on Wednesday, up around 500,000 from Tuesday's election day, according to web usage tracking firm, Media Metrix. The week before the election, CNN.com notched up a mere one million visitors a day.

News websites ABCNews.com and MSNBC.com, which is partly owned by Microsoft, also saw triple digit percentage gains taking their visitor numbers above one million and two million, respectively.

Even the sites run by the two candidates saw an increase in visits. Internet analysts Nielsen/NetRatings said that daily visitors spiked during business hours on Wednesday, with Texas Governor George W Bush's site attracting 289,000 visitors, a jump of 195 per cent overnight, and US Vice-President Al Gore's site rising 37 per cent to 111,000 hits.

But despite the post-election brouhaha, Betty Cho, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings, observed that while the web had played a part in the run up to the election, it wasn't nearly as "successful as people had expected".

She believes the role the candidates' web sites played was far more defensive than offensive. The candidates used their sites to answer opponents' charges rather than as a launch pad for positive ideas.

Gore may have once claimed to have invented the web, but Cho felt he "really wasn't sure how to use it".