When we launched Enron Explorer a few days before Jeffrey Skilling’s sentencing we hoped it might capture people’s interest and give them a way to dig below the headlines. The response has been fantastic. 20,000 people visited the site in the first forty-eight hours following Skilling’s sentencing. After this initial peak people kept on coming, reaching a total of 40,000 visitors over the first two weeks from 100 countries around the world. People have done some great detective work too, judging by the skulduggery and scandals highlighted on the comments page.

Naturally we’re all delighted; particularly since the system kept on running smoothly under this battering, which included being BoingBoinged and hitting the front page of Digg.

Since we got Boing Boing’ed yesterday, Google Analytics shows that we’ve had over 21,000 page views so far – and that’s just to the front page. Unfortunately the GA javascript can’t be included in the main app, as it’s pretty much all AJAX requests, so we’ll have to wait for analysis of the Apache logs for full statistics.

I also put the Enron Explorer on del.icio.us 4 days ago – it’s now been echoed by 112 people, including one who speaks Russian, by the looks of it. Google Analytics confirms that we’ve had visitors from 71 different countries, interestingly enough including two from the Cayman Islands and one from an anonymising proxy – Kenny Boy, that’s not you is it….?

Some of the comments are fantastic :

fpaulus “Interesting (both technologically and economically) walk through the Enron e-mail archives”

markwithasee “searchable database of all of enron’s internal email from 99-02. WOW.”

RStacy “A look into what the future could look like in corporate transparency and analysis.”

slightlyfleury (ahem – best not repeated here!)

some of the tags that people have applied to it (under the posting history on the right) are also interesting – I always find it intriguing to see how other people see what we’ve done.