Blegging from Cairo -- the price of getting too many hits

Elijah Zarwan needs money. Soon.
I don't have any to spare, but I do have my little blog (free, thanks to Blogger and low stats).
Perhaps one of my readers knows someone who knows someone...

It seems he linked to a pdf document that is getting so much traffic that the extra bandwidth charges are more than his rent.
.

When I started this blog, I never really thought anyone would read it. I was surprised and dismayed to find people did. Now I’m really dismayed.

About two months ago, I posted a link to a .pdf compiling satellite imagery of Bahraini royal palaces from Google Earth sent to me by a Gulf-based correspondent who said this was why Bahrain had briefly blocked Google Earth. By way of a circuitous trail of links, and thanks in part to an unusual interest in Bahrain because of that country’s parliamentary elections, that link wound up on Boing Boing.

a7a.

The Boing Boing link resulted in a few newspaper articles. Now so many people are downloading that heavy .pdf that I owe my hosting company $618 in charges for extra bandwidth. That’s three months’ rent on my apartment here in Cairo.

So I say again: “a7a.”

It was a cool little .pdf. But it’s now the cool little .pdf that’s burning me out of house and home, one gig at a time. I didn’t even make the damned thing (contrary to the allegations of one senior editor at Foreign Policy, who now thinks I’m some sort of quaint Marxist). So please: Everyone who already downloaded it (Bahraini royal family?), post it. I can’t afford to host it anymore.

Zarwan's blog, The Skeptic, is one of my favorites. Erudite, timely and to the point. It's no wonder someone noticed what he posted. This most recent post is a case in point. He knows a good scoop when he sees it.