Yesterday the New York Times posted an op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof about Li Xinde, a Chinese blogger who travels around the country investigating abuses of power and publishing them on his blog. (Unless you can read Chinese, I wouldn’t suggest bothering to click on the link.)
All well and good. These sorts of things should be publicized.
But the article also included a live hyperlink, much like the one above, and the resulting influx of traffic has forced the blog temporarily offline. As of right now, the site is still down. Can you say oops?
This is a great example of the Slashdot effect at work (even though it wasn’t posted on slashdot, the principle applies). A simple disclaimer that the site is in Chinese probably would have sufficed to keep the site from going down.
Update 26 May: It looks like Mr. Li’s blog is back up.
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Chris Hansen
May 25, 2005
The infamous ‘Slashdot Effect’ was first chronicled by a science fiction writer, Larry Niven, exploring the effect of cheap efficient teleportation and the ensuing ‘flash mobs’ of people that would show up to anything interesting. I remember it in one of his short stories about Gil Hamilton but I don’t remember the title – they were later anthologized in “The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton”. Quite good reading if you can find it.
Man, I’m just a wellspring of useless information today, huh.