Buyer be... where?

Morbid curiosity.

That's what leads me to be online at 2:04am, hitting Refresh on my browser every so often, wondering if www.clickfrenzy.com.au will suddenly leap to life. Well, morbid curiosity and the fact that it's a hot night in Melbourne, and being one of the first of the season, I'm not handling it well.

November 20 was supposed to mark a great day in cyber-shopping in Australia. Over two hundred companies were to offer an avalanche of bargains for twenty-four hours, letting rabid shoppers and Christmas-present-buyers go commercially nuts from their own home. However, the evening became another monument to the fact that many Aussie retailers have taken to netshopping like a duck to lava.

So what went wrong? Why were organisers predicting peak-hour net traffic, but were apparently unready for it? Some of news.com.au's finest investigative journalism had unearthed a few prices, "leaked" presale. I can only imagine the effort and ingenuity required to cultivate a source of such closely guarded information. Perhaps such a catastrophic breach of security resulted in a level of interest beyond expectations? Or perhaps notorious hacker clan Anonymous have gotten involved; no longer content with making political points or hounding child abusers, they have turned their efforts to preventing the spread of sonic skin cleansers at 30% off (yes, the site is working now, and I have bad skin. Sue me.)?

One thing can be taken from this - anyone inconvenienced by this system crash, buyer or seller, who is also against the installation of the National Broadband Network, needs to give him- or herself a quick wake-up slapping. Sure, a quick stroll through Twitter might lead you to ask why we could  possibly need some of these messages any quicker - "FML" is a sulk, no matter at how many megabits per second it flies around the world - but the good stuff will flow freer as well. You know, medical data, the contents of the world's libraries and galleries, pictures wittily captioned in a white blocky font. In the meantime, we continue with slower and costlier internet than much of the world, and in the offices of the coordinators of a certain online sale, trying to find certain people at their desks will result in a real-life 404 error.