Robin Sloan has pointed to the story behind EPIC.

For those of you who have not heard of EPIC, it was a Flash-presentation on the 'future of news' developed by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson while they both worked at the Poynter Institute. The presentation spread like wildfire on the net. I hosted one of the original mirrors of the file and was averaging over 10GB per day in transfer. One day saw close to 40GB in traffic for this little 'project'. It was fun looking at my web server logs. The standard practice would be a person in the office viewing EPIC then forwarding the URL on to everyone else, i.e. 1 request from xx.com shortly followed by 45 requests from xx.com.

The story-behind-the-story is an interesting read.