"Digg Nuking"

In an attempt to bring more items of IMPORT to Axinar's, I've been reviewing the RSS feeds of some of the "Social Bookmarking" sites like Digg and Reddit and I have noticed a certain disturbing phenomenon.

It seems that certain REALLY popular stories generate SO much traffic that they cause their source servers to overload.

Case in point was a really neat sounding one tonight called "Dear Senator Hillary Clinton, Please Step Down. You divide." But when you click on the link you get a really nice message from some outfit called "BellaWebHosting" that screams at you: "This Account Has Been Suspended".

Now, this is not a new phenomenon. It used to occur quite frequently when stories got picked up on Slashdot and they would crash servers. They called it, "The Slashdot Effect". I'm not entirely sure why but I haven't seen that happen in a while.

Now what's interesting of course is that this "Dear Senator Hillary Clinton" story only has 725 "diggs". Now, if this were only 725 hits, even most small servers could handle it, but I'm getting the impression that there are something on the order of 10 to 100 hits per digg. Of course no mortal server could survive that.

On the other hand, I suppose this is a reminder that this technology in some ways is still very much in its infancy, and, yes, boys and girls, it looks like we may actually start having to figure out a way to start peer-to-peer hosting BLOGS for the love of God ...