on a lark i was visiting my site stats & came across something unusual: i seemed to be doing quite a lot of traffic.

the stats page resets whenever the server is rebooted, so they only go as far back as 11/02. right now, it says i've been transfering an average of 9.93GB per day. usually i peak at 1GB/day max! that's a lot of traffic. scrolling down further, i discovered that all this traffic seems to be for one specific file: /stallio_-_we_will_iraq_you.mp3. in fact right now it says i've gotten 10,072 requests for that file since november 2.

that's an insane amount of traffic for this site! so i googled "we will iraq you" looking for some popular site that might be linked to the file, resulting in those numbers. i couldn't find any specific site, but i did find a couple interesting things.

i'm not the only person to have thought of the "we will iraq you" joke: various bloggers, message board posters, & the like have included the phrase somewhere in their online ramblings. one or two have even explicitly talked of reworking the queen song. i seem to be the only one to have done the actual splicing. apparently there's a conservative parody writer named paul silhan who released a clinton song with the same name in 1998. though since his work has been prominently featured on the rush limbaugh show, and he doesn't sample at all, i reckon his piece is quite different than mine.

i also found a site called active opposition with audio & video galleries as well as news & activist info. that site has an mp3 on the site (currently attributed to "artist unknown") called "we will iraq you". turns out that yes, it's my track... but it's a shorter "radio edit" version without the 7 minutes of c-span noise at the end. i don't know who made this edit. i'm pretty sure i didn't do it. i did give ctephin permission to create such an edit, but then ctephin would know who to credit... is that what happened, but the attribution got lost? did someone else somewhere on the net do it, sensing intuitively that the track doesn't really need all those c-span callers at the end? i don't know, but since creating that edit was a good idea anyway, shortly i will upload a copy of it to the site here for folks to download (properly credited this time). [update: file is now avaiable here]

my only theory right now about the high traffic is that the track has picked up a lot of buzz by being referenced in the INtake article and being played on the free zone last saturday. but that doesn't really account for the stats: neither of those link to the file, so someone would still have to search & find the file through the site, but the main page & mp3 pages would have a lot of hits too. i suspect something else is going on, but i'm not sure what.