Wired reports that foreign news websites are seeing large volumes of traffic from America, as U.S. citizens increasingly seek news coverage about the coming war.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 49 percent of the Guardian's 1.3 million unique visitors (that's the number of different visitors, not the site's total traffic) in January originated from the Americas. Likewise, Nielsen said a quarter of the visitors to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's website in January were from the Americas.

According to Richard Goosey, NetRating's international chief of measurement science, traffic from the Americas was not the result of an across-the-board increase in news consumption.

Jon Dennis, Guardian Unlimited deputy news editor, said U.S. readers are visiting his site for the range of opinions it publishes, and to engage in vigorous debate. Media outlets in the United States, he said, are not presenting the issues critically.

"As a journalist, I find it quite strange that there's not more criticism of the Bush administration in the American media," he said. "It's as though the whole U.S. is in shock (from Sept. 11). It's hard for (the media) to be dispassionate about it. It seems as though they're not thinking as clearly as they should be [ ... ] Weblogs are doing all the work that the U.S. media did in the past," Dennis said. "That's an interesting development."