Science Addiction

I just put up rant on WideScreen Glory about the ridiculous push by theatre owners to jam cell phones in movie theatres. From that article

The annoying, distracting, place-reserved-in-hell, cell phone users are not the cause (of the movie industry slump); they are a nail in the coffin. [...] In the past, the government tried to ban cell phones on airplanes based on the loosely defined threat of terrorists with phones. As with that case, the benefit of allowing decent people to keep their cell phones at their discretion far outweighs the annoyances of movie cell phone users.

On Sunday, the 18th of December this website was the victim of the slashdot effect. That is, we were slashdotted.

slashdotted
Function: Verb
Etymology: Post-modern geekspeak
1 a: to kill a web server through excessive traffic, usually caused by a link from slashdot.org
Usage: Science Addiction was slashdotted on Sunday because I submitted my article on open source charity for the holiday season.

Here are a few stats from the aftermath:

• So far, in 2 days, my server has recorded 9000 views for the article linked from slashdot.
• In the first 6-8 hours after the effect, the site was practically inaccessible. Read comments on slashdot to that effect.
• So far, 5 people besides me have del.icio.us’ed my article! Translation: they added it to their web-bookmarks at del.icio.us.
• This website, which till a few days ago barely received a dozen visitors a day, is averaging in the hundreds 50-ish hours after the effect

Interesting stuff, to say the least. I will put more facts up as I come up with them!

UPDATE (12/22/05): A few more facts…

• A vast majority of the slashdotters use Mozilla Firefox. Many use Apple with Safari, and finally, a few poor souls actually use MSIE, though I would like to believe they are online from their place of work and have no choice. If so, please switch jobs quick!


• Many Linux users… no surprises there. Many of those were Ubuntu linux users; seems like Ubuntu is popular with the slashdot crowd.

Many people around the world plan their charitable giving around this time of the year, for religious, tax or other similarly benevolent reasons. As a geek who spends an inordinate amount of time with around his computer, these are the entities that have made my life easier in the past year and deserve all the recognition, money and general fulfillment of all Amazon Wish List desires: Read more »

Steve Audio has a great article on why The Beatles matter and how they changed everything. It should be required reading for anyone who appreciates modern pop, rock… or anything that came out of a studio in the last 50 years. Read more »

The internet is adding language to our collective vocabularies faster than any other ‘invention ’. Here’s a prediction (if you haven’t heard enough of those):

In the future, flickr’ed will be part of you vocabulary.

Yep- you will be googling blogs with flickr’ed albums and nobody from the last century will have a clue what you just did. Maybe people will del.icio.us you too. And hopefully, AJAX-ing the CMS will be out of date. Read more »