At first, it seemed almost too good to be true: a website where one obsessed audio fan had encoded and uploaded thousands of rare and collectable 78-rpm recordings, and was providing them for free to anyone who wanted them. And after an initial report from Wired magazine, the website suddenly disappeared and was unreachable.
Had the creator of the site decided to take it down? Had the record industry sent legal takedown notices because some of the recordings were still under copyright? Was it some kind of prank?
As it turns out, the attention that Cliff Bolling's site got after the Wired piece was picked up by other online media outlets sent so much traffic to the site that his service provider - a division of Web giant Yahoo - pulled the plug, even though Bolling had an account that allegedly provided unlimited bandwidth.
At its peak, the site was getting more than 6,000 hits an hour, after getting a fraction of that prior to the magazine story. Given the huge increase in traffic, Yahoo was apparently concerned that it would affect other account holders on the same servers. So it took the site down until it could get in touch with Bolling and confirm that it was legitimate traffic, and set up a plan to deal with it.
The site is now back online, with more than 3,700 freely available 78 tracks such as Cliff Steward's Aba Daba Honeymoon, recorded in 1951 - the first record Bolling says he ever owned. And the music buff says that he still has several thousand other 78s ready to capture and upload, which he expects will take him the better part of the next decade.
For more links and details, please see the Ingram 2.0 blog at globetechnology.com
