Hundreds of bloggers have been sending their readers to charities that accept donations for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, with traffic and donors focusing on sites such as those of the Red Cross and Salvation Army, writes MediaPost. Traffic at RedCross.org surged 184 percent from August 30 to August 31, jumping from 390,000 unique visitors to more than 1.1 million - roughly the number of visitors for all of December 2004, during the Southeast-Asian tsunami disaster relief effort, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

According to Intelliseek's Blogpulse tool, 3.01 percent of all blog posts on Thursday were related to the hurricane, and .014 percent of all blog posts mentioned or linked to RedCross.org - up from 0.001 percent on Wednesday, or a nearly fifteen-fold increase. Metions of the Salvation Army increase seven-and-a-half times, going from 0.031 percent on Thursday to 0.232 percent of blog posts on Thursday.

According to a report by Keynote, the response times of the sites' host servers slowed significantly as a result of the massive traffic. Measurements taken from the 25 biggest U.S. cities show the sites were "only sporadically available" from 7:00 a.m. to noon both on Thursday and Friday.