Coming to Terms With the /. Effect
In the past few weeks, I have been boingboinged, slashdotted and spurled. And I survived. To those in The Know this is the pinnacle of one's online experience. The problem is that those outside The Know have no idea what I'm talking about. This is a shame because it is, possibly, the future of how we get our information online.
First off, to bring those of you not in The Know up to speed: Boing Boing (boingboing.net), Slashdot (slashdot.org, named after the slashes and dots in a Web site address) and Spurl.net (spurl.net) are Web sites. Each, in slightly different ways, monitors the pages of the World Wide Web, and posts links to interesting Web pages. Readers then click on those links.
The good news is that hundreds of thousands of readers all visiting your Web site at the same time means sudden popularity. The bad news is that it also means sudden traffic that your servers might not be able to handle. It's a bit like thousands of people turning up on your doorstep to view an old fridge you advertised in the local paper. And expecting a cup of tea. There's even a term for this uninvited gathering: The Slashdot Effect.
If all this sounds horribly nerdy, I'd agree. I wasn't really clued in myself until it happened to me. A few weeks ago, after writing about software that runs off keychain USB drives in this column ("Keeping Your Drive," March 11-13), I posted a list of such programs to my online journal, or blog (loosewireblog.com). One morning I woke up to learn the meaning of being slashdotted: The number of visitors to my blog had risen from the usual 300 an hour to a high of nearly 9,000. Luckily the company hosting my blog could handle the burst in traffic, and the visitors were a polite bunch. They left helpful messages and no one broke any china. But it made me realize where the Internet is going.
Virtuous Circles
It's like this. Readers rely on Web sites such as Slashdot and Boing Boing because they find interesting stuff most readers don't have time to look for themselves. This makes these sites hugely influential, because the more stuff that is out there on the Internet, the more these kind of filtered collections of information are needed. It's a virtuous circle, and probably a pretty close mirror of what happened in the early days of newspapers. What are newspapers if not filtered collections of information of interest to a reader?
This isn't new. Slashdot has been around a while. Eight years, in fact, and the Slashdot Effect is already old. So old that one business magazine, Business Week, last month suggested its impact has "begun to fizzle." This is true, but that's not because fewer people are using Slashdot . The Web site is still the premier resource for geeks. The reason for the fizzle is that it's overshadowed by the huge growth in the Internet, in particular, by blogs -- the horribly named "blogosphere." When Jeff Henning, who runs an online survey service, Perseus Development, did a survey in late 2003 he found more than four million blogs. Earlier this year he found nearly 20 million. And while the vast majority don't survive, quite a few that do are becoming more and more popular. The daily traffic to just one blog hosting company, TypePad, overtook that of Slashdot last August. The point? Well, I believe the blogosphere -- and the Internet as a whole -- is maturing into a place where information finds its way from the fringes to the center. This is because the links between all these disparate sources of information are reaching critical mass.
Let me go back to my own example: Slashdot brought a burly mob of geeks to my blog, few of whom hung around. Within five hours of the initial Slashdot hit -- the link being posted and the instantaneous spike in traffic -- the number of visitors had fallen back a more manageable 2,000 visitors an hour. Ten hours later the visitors were back to three digits. Compare that to the more refined Boing Boing crowd, who visited my Web site after an (arguably less nerdy) article on Moleskine notebooks had been mentioned ("Turning Over a New Leaf," Jan. 14-16). The traffic was more modest than Slashdot , but it was spread over a longer period, and is still coming back. Says Eytan Adar, a researcher at the HP Labs Information Dynamics Group who has compared the two phenomena: "Boing Boing has its own set of loyal readers so a post will also cause elevated discussion. It just tends to be a little later and a little less dramatic than the Slashdot one." In other words, the Slashdot reader is giving way to one with broader interests.
Social Surfing
You can see something similar in the world of social bookmarking, a topic I looked at a few weeks back ("Tagging the Internet," Jan. 28-30). Services like del.icio.us (del.icio.us) offer users a chance to label Web sites they like so they can find them again easily. But the labels are also public, so everyone else can see what other surfers find of interest. Indeed Spurl.net works along similar lines. When their 16,000 users voted my USB programs blog page number five on the list of "hot pages" on Spurl.net one week last month, they did so by bookmarking that page in their Spurl lists.
It's still early days, and still rather geeky. As Hjalmar Gislason, the Icelandic founder of Spurl.net admits: "The 'interest pool' of Spurlers is certainly getting wider, but it's still pretty central to programming, HTML, the Internet, politics and caffeinated drinks." But he hopes to broaden the audience, and, as with everything technology related, that is how things start out.
But while you may well still turn to television and newspapers to get your filtered information, expect a narrowing of the online gap between the mainstream and the periphery -- those out of The Know and those in. Who knows, it could be your homepage or blog that gets boingboinged, slashdotted and spurled next. If it does, I promise to bring my own teacup.
你被Slashdot了吗？
在过去的几周里，我遭遇Boingboing，被Slashdot，然后又Spurl了，但我都熬了过来。内行人都明白我所说的是一种尖端的个人上网经历。问题是，外行人听到这些话时可能是一头雾水。这不能不说是一种遗憾，因为这很有可能就是未来我们从网上获取信息的方式。
我先给外行人做些解释：Boing Boing（boingboing.net）、Slashdot（slashdot.org，取自网址中用到的斜杠(Slash)和点(dot)之意）以及Spurl（spurl.net）都是一些网站的名字。这些网站大同小异，主要都是跟踪互联网的各类网页，并在网站上贴出有趣的网站链接，供读者点击接入。
成千上万的读者在同一时间访问你的网站能让你一夜成名，这可是件不错的事情。不过这也意味著突然增加的流量会让你的服务器不堪重负，这就好像是你在当地报纸上刊登了一则出售旧冰箱的广告，上千人一下子都跑到你家门口要求看看冰箱，最好再来上一杯茶。目前有一个专用名词描述这种现象：Slashdot效应。
如果你觉得所有这些听起来都很无趣，我会举双手赞成。其实一开始我自己对此也没有任何概念，直到有一天它发生在了我的身上。几周前，我写了一篇有关钥匙串(keychain) USB驱动器软件的文章，我把这些软件信息贴在了我的网络日志(blog)上（loosewireblog.com）。一天早上当我醒来的时候，我终于明白了被Slashdot的意思：访问我的网络日志的人数从平常的每小时300人猛然增加到近9,000人。幸运的是，为我提供网络日志服务的公司还能从容处理这种流量暴增的情况，并且访客们也都很有礼貌，他们写下了一些有用的留言，没有给我的网络日志造成任何破坏。不过，这一事件也让我意识到了今天的网络世界已经发展到了怎样的程度。
就像这样，读者们依赖类似Slashdot和Boing Boing的网站寻找那些有趣的东西，因为多数读者根本没有时间自己去找。这些网站也由此拥有了巨大的影响力，因为网络上的内容越多，人们就越需要这种经过过滤的信息，这形成了一个良性循环，有些像在报纸出现的早期阶段的情形，试想如果对消息不加遴选，报纸会成什么样子？
这些网站也不是什么新生事物，实际上Slashdot已存在8年的时间，而Slashdot效应也有一定的年头，《商业周刊》(Business Week)上月甚至暗示其影响已经开始减弱。实际情况的确如此，不过并不是因为Slashdot的用户正在减少，它仍是各种新奇网站的首要集散地，其影响力减弱主要是受到网络迅速膨胀的威胁，特别是网络日志的出现－－即所谓的“网络日志空间”(blogosphere)。亨宁(Jeff Henning)经营著一家网络调查公司Perseus Development，他在2003年末的一项调查中发现有超过400万的网络日志，而今年年初时这一数字达到了近2,000万。虽然其中绝大多数网络日志很快就被弃用了，但也有相当一部分的网络日志越来越受到欢迎。去年8月份，仅一家网络日志托管公司TypePad的日访问量就超过了Slashdot。这说明了什么？我认为网络日志－－以及整个互联网－－正在朝著将信息从边缘地带转移到中心位置的方向发展。
让我们再回到我的例子，Slashdot把一大批用户引到了我的网络日志中，但他们之中几乎没有人在此做过多的停留。在经历了5个小时访问量骤增的情况后，访客的数量又回落到了每小时2,000人的水平。10小时后，访客数量更下降至3位数。与此相比，Boing Boing用户访问我的网站的情形有所不同。当我的一篇文章出现在Boing Boing之后，许多Boing Boing用户开始涌向我的网站，不过流量较Slashdot的温和许多，并且流量增长的状况持续了一段较长的时间，直到现在还时有增加。HP Labs Information Dynamics Group的研究员阿达尔(Eytan Adar)在比较这两种情况时表示，Boing Boing有一批忠实的读者，贴出来的一个网站往往会引起深入的讨论。它的反应可能较Slashdot缓慢，同时也没有那么激烈。换句话说，是Slashdot读者给那些有更大兴趣的人让路了。
可能你还会通过电视和报纸获得精选的信息，但预计以后我们所说的内行人和外行人的差距会逐渐缩小。谁知道呢，也许下一个遭遇Boingboing，被Slashdot和Spurl的就是你的主页或是网络日志，到时候我一定也去凑热闹。
