The Egypt Unrest is a receiving a lot of attention internationally, and from online viewers too. The TV network has seen its web traffic increase 2,500 percent at the time of its reporting about the violent clashes in the country. Twenty-six million minutes of live video were streamed in one Friday night.  It’s yet another way in which the Egypt protests is contextualized in numbers, helping us to understand a core perspective in the affects of a country caught in the throes of discourse.

“UK-based live streaming startup Livestation.com has been struggling to keep its servers up and running, and now said it has seen 800 percent more hits than usual. “We’ve hit just about every server limit there is,” the company said late Sunday.”

Livestation.com is an Al-Jazeera distribution partner, who also scored the network’s English-language feed availability via Dailymotion thanks to a partnership between itself and the French video outlet.

In turn, Google also got itself involved. The last ISP in Egypt, “Noor”, was shut down, yet the Egyptian population can still access social media, or at least Twitter, thanks to Google. Google, Twitter and SayNow which was acquired by Google recently developed a speak-to-tweet service. Users can tweet by simply calling +16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855 and leaving a voicemail. Tweets posted via the service automatically include the #egypt hashtag.

See here for the Cloud ANGLE on Egypt’s internet kill switch, according to detailed statistics provided by a recent Akamai report.  It’s a frightening situation dealing with the voice of a people, raising a lot of questions about the rights to access certain means of communication, the power of a government, and how that power should be utilized.  Please share your thoughts in the comment thread.
[image credit: derStandard]