On August 17th, my blog suddenly started receiving an amazing number of hits; its intense popularity lasted a couple of hours.
When I looked at the web analytics, I saw that readers were surfing in from the front page of del.icio.us, because an article of mine ("What do small nonprofits need to know about fundraising for technology?") was featured on the del.icio.us hotlist. I was pretty flattered, because the hotlist usually features web pages that have been bookmarked by thousands of del.icio.us users, while my article has only been bookmarked 64 times as of this writing.
All of this extra traffic inspired me to think about the Slashdot Effect, which is a crash or malfunction that occurs when a link is featured on Slashdot web site and becomes so popular that reader demand far exceeds the web server's capacity. Thanks to my blog host, Tucows, I had no such difficulties. But now I'm wondering whether in the future we'll be speaking of web sites that are "delicioused," just as we now refer to web sites that are "slashdotted."
