Never Forget

[Chris Boggs]

Peace to those who are suffering with the vivid memories of September 11, 2001.

[seomike]

I'll never forget where I was when the news came in. I still remember filling up the firemen's boots with as much money as I could find in the car while waiting at a red light in the days afterwards.

[sheseltine]

Here's an email I got from a friend of mine the next day, I'm sure she won't mind me posting it

What a day it was. I am usually in work around 8 but was running late and had just come out of the World Trade Center and crossed the street to Century 21 dept. store when I heard the first plane overhead. I looked up and saw tons of smoke and all this debris coming down - huge pieces of steel falling from above onto the streets where people were running. There were millions of pieces of paper swirling overhead in the sky. I ran into Century 21 and left a message for my mom that I was ok.

I stayed there for about 5 minutes til the rest of the heavy debris stopped, then I walked quickly 3 blocks down to my office. My manager didn't even know what happened. We all went up to the roof on the 8th floor and that's when we saw the second explosion along with a huge fireball. We ran back in at that point.

We stayed in our building til well after both towers collapsed - we could feel the rumble of each collapse one under our feet - I'm sure you did too, and it went from daylight to pitch black from all the smoke and dust.

So I got home about 5:30 after a 3 hour wait in line for the ferry - that was the only way back to NJ at that point. There were probably several hundred people on the ferry and you could have heard a pin drop during our ride over to Jersey. When we got off in Hoboken, they made us go through "detox" - we had to shower with all our clothes on. Nobody was complaining though. Then while I was on the bus to my house, we saw Building 7 collapse in the distance.

Went I got off my train yesterday at the World Trade, I used the Mac machine inside. I still have the receipt that shows the time and date: 8:40 a.m. Gonna hold onto that.

I don't know when I'll be able to return to work, hopefully soon, but the commute will be completely different - I'm still unsure as to how I will get there.

[Webvisitor]

Shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001 I received a story from FDNY Firefighter Tommy Dunn who was just outside the South Tower as it began to collapse. I posted the story on my firefighter story website that I have since moved to blog form.
http://firefighterexchange.blogspot.com/

[bhartzer]

One of my vivid memories of that day was the extraordinary number of domains that were registered and sites that were put up in such a short amount of time.

Yahoo! probably had tons of editors adding and reviewing sites to their new Yahoo! Category that they created.

In all my years as a Search Marketer (I started doing this in 1996), I don't remember any single event that has caused so many web sites and web content to be generated. The next biggest one would be the death of Princess Diana--many people put up sites and web pages about that event.

[Chris Boggs]

very interesting Bill. Do you think Hurricane Katrina-related sites are still on the rise and might someday rival 9/11 and Princess Diana?

[bhartzer]

I don't think the events of Hurricane Katrina or Princess Diana will rival the number of sites that have been put up regarding September 11th. By looking at the Yahoo! Directory, I'm seeing about 200+/- sites for Sept 11th and about half that for those other 2 events. There are also a lot of subcategories for September 11th, and there aren't many for the other events.

I don't have access to the data, but it would be interesting to see how many domain names were registered in the two days following each of these events. I would suspect that there were thousands of domain names registered in the days following the September 11th Attacks and not as many following Hurricana Katrina or even Princess Diana's death.