Mohamed Nanabhay and the team at Al Jazeera have been using chartbeat to react swiftly to the revolution in Egypt. We’ve watched in awe as a news service ignored by many of the major cable companies became, at least for a while, the most important news site in the world. Below is a visualization of concurrent traffic for english.aljazeera.net during the 18 day revolution.
18 Days
of rallying until Mubarak resigned
335
deaths
79 Mil.
people with a new beginning
Wednesday 1/26: Second day of protests.
Saturday 1/29: Internet users help Egyptians communicate.
Sunday 1/30: Hillary Clinton speaks out and states that Egypt must transition to Democracy.
Monday 1/31: Egypt's new government is announced and sworn in.
Thursday 2/3: Foreign journalists rounded up.
Friday 2/4: "Day of Departure" protests held across Egypt.
Saturday 2/5: Members of Ruling Party Leaders resign.
Sunday 2/6: Government agrees on concessions.
Monday 2/7: Google executive released in Egypt.
Tuesday 2/8: Freed activist energizes protests.
Thursday 2/9: Widespread labor strikes throughout Egypt.
As you can imagine our newsrooms and field teams have been on full throttle over the past three weeks. While Al Jazeera very quickly became the worlds window into the revolution in Egypt, Chartbeat proved invaluable as my window into our audience and website. From deploying resources to prioritizing updates, from rolling new features to identifying technical issues on the site, we were able to make better decisions more quickly based on real-time data.