Australians rallied online support for their Olympic team over the weekend, in a last-minute ticket-buying spree and an e-mailing frenzy that saw hundreds of messages of goodwill forwarded to the Olympic Village.
The Nielsen/NetRatings Web Olympics Index, which provides a daily analysis of Web traffic to Olympics sites worldwide, found that gamesinfo.com.au was the fastest-growing site on Saturday.
"The assumption drawn is that people were searching [gamesinfo.com.au] for last-minute tickets," an ACNielsen spokesperson told ZDNet Australia.
Aussie supporters, eagerly sourcing information about venues, session times and ticket availability, took total page views of gamesinfo.com.au up 1394 percent.
Meanwhile, IBM's FanMail Web site (www.ibm.com/fanmail) -- which allows fans and athletes to converse via e-mail -- surged 1322 percent from 3115 page views on Friday to a massive 44,295 page views when competition took off on Saturday.
FanMail has proved to be "more popular than I'd ever expected," IBM's manager of worldwide Olympic marketing, Al Dell'Aglio said.
With well over 110,000 FanMail messages sent to date, Dell'Aglio says there has been a noticeable surge since the Games kicked off.
The FanMail network, which was averaging between 3000 and 5000 daily messages in the build up to the Games, has now hit the 11,000 mark.
"The numbers [of FanMail messages] at this stage, considering we're only a couple of days into the competition, are well ahead of the last two Games," Dell'Aglio said.
