Sites buckle under Obama Nobel buzz

So, President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Many at the Monitor and other news outlets are writing about this right now, trying to help the public grasp the weight of the pick of Obama as the third sitting US president to win the award. But many people have already taken to the Web to discuss the choice – and the enormous surge in interest is bringing some sites to their knees.

The official Nobel committee site was having trouble loading even its navigation bar images this morning, as the image above shows.

But Twitter, having fixed the timeline problems it dealt with yesterday, seems to be staying afloat. Obama and Nobel-related topics filled nearly half of Twitter's trending topics list, but NASA's moon bombing still held its own. As people learned of the pick, searches for Obama or Peace Prize returned thousands of new tweets per minute.

Facebook also saw a surge of Nobel chatter. Many status updates mentioned the award this morning, ranging from the silly: "What? They gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize? Haven't they heard about Brett Favre?" to the, well, sillier: "Yo Barack, I'm really happy for you and imma let you finish, but Morgan Tsvangirai was one the most peaceful dudes ever." Others expressed outrage, and an "Obama does not deserve the Nobel Prize" group sprang up quickly, but has just 72 members as of 10:30 a.m. EDT.

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