Other Sources of the "Slashdot Effect"?

mattsucks asks: "I was surfing Google News today, looking for something interesting. I had just loaded the page, and hit refresh. A new story popped up at the top of the news page, so I chased the link. 'Server Too Busy, Try Again Later' replied the kind webserver. Obviously a Google News-driven Slashdotting was in effect (pun intended). Another example: one of our local talk-radio DJs likes to have his listeners pound the web sites of anyone he is peeved at. He's the #1 DJ in his slot, so when he says 'click' he generates a LOT of traffic. What other causes have people found of the Slashdot Effect?"

Comments

Are you serious?

[ObviousGuy]

Drudge
Limbaugh
Fark
MSNBC
Slate
CNN
Natural disasters
National disasters
etc.

It seems like you're just coming up with questions for the sake of asking a question. That's the epitome of boring. Responding to such a question is only marginally less boring.

It's an emerging problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed that some of the big news sites (eg: abcnews.com / msnbc.com) often tend to avoid linking to sites that they mention in stories.

I've been infuriated several times being unable to find a link to a site that they were talking about. I originally thought that perhaps it was because they were afraid they would loose page views if their readers discover those other sites.

Now I'm not so sure. After seeing the number of sites that Slashdot destroys on a daily basis, someone much bigger (cnn.com, etc) could do much more damage than Slashdot ever could if they linked from a high-profile story to a small site.

This poses an interesting problem. As people clump around the large popular sites, links between some sites will become one-way. That is, the smaller can link to the bigger, but not vice-versa. The web is no longer equal. At what point does this become a form of self-censorship with knowledge hosted on smaller sites unaccessable to the masses?

viri

[WickerChap]

This has been done by a virus in the past - the browser homepage was set to a HTTP served file that was a trojan executable. The virus spread so quickly that it became a victim of its own success due to the servers hosting the file crashing.