If you’re one of the 53,000 plus who have agreed to shutdown their computers for an entire day, the time has come. Tomorrow is your day.
If you haven’t yet heard of the shutdown day, read this post and go to shutdownday.org. If you’re interested in fueling the experiment, go for it. I for one will be using my computer as normal, though I’m interested to find out what effect, if any, the experiment will have.
Things that, in my opinion, will be affected:
- Torrents - everyone participating in the shutdown day only knows about it because they are web junkies. Many web junkies seed and download torrents. There will be far fewer seeders and even leechers.
- Digg/social bookmarking sites - less people using the Internet means less submissions and votes to Digg and other similar sites.
- eBay - If you’re one of the unfortunate souls who submitted products to eBay last Saturday (especially gadgets or other geeky stuff), I hope you’re prepared to sell for way less than you expected.
- Power companies - this will probably be such a tiny hiccup that the power companies won’t even notice. But computers use a noticeable amount of electricity and a mass shutdown of PCs could lower overall power consumption.
Really, we don’t know the overall effect of such an experiment, but that is precisely why it is being done. It will be interesting to see if anything noticeable happens at all.
Tags: Shutdown Day, March 24
