It's not a denial of service attack; you've been slashdotted! Someone mentioned your low traffic web site on the evening news and suddenly your servers are overwhelmed.

Most ISP contracts cap your traffic, just turn off the faucet after the first n megabytes downloaded.

Scott Johnson:

If I was Cmdr Taco or Hemos or anyone at VA, I would introduce "SlashSurance: Insurance Against the Slashdot Effect".  This would be something like this:

• $10 annually for a single notification email sent no more than 1 hour before reference to your url is posted.  And, if we detect that you promote this before it goes up on Slashdot then we reserve the right to pull the story (or any future coverage of you).
• $25 annually for a days worth of automatic mirroring to a server of our own
• REQUIRED: Absolutely 0 conflict of interest with the editorial process.  Ideally no one on the editorial side should even know who signed up.
• Low key marketing effort

I'm not sure about anyone else but I would have no objection to paying $25 or $10 just for the piece of mind that this would bring me.

While /. might offer this service, it is too little too late for most people.

That's why your ISP should offer this; it is the point of pain.

• Traffic badge goes on your page ("My HugeHosting DOS Insurance Is Paid Up!")
• Traffic spikes trigger your ISP to make a mirror of your site and deploy traffic distribution
• The mirror includes text ads; generating revenue without undue bandwidth costs
• Mirrors die off as traffic does
• Helps ISPs upsell service to you if the new traffic is a trend instead of a spike
• ISPs spread the risk of being slashdotted among their customers. 1-3 orders of magnitude jumps in traffic.
• ISPs spread the most serious of risks (the President mentions your site in a TV speech; your nude pictures surface) among multiple ISPs through a Reinsurance (insuring insurers) program. 5+ order of magnitude jumps.

I think there is real money in this, a dollar a month from every hopeful small business site or weblogger.

Like lotto, it is a tasty bet on your dream of a long shot upside.

Dave Winer:

When I post a comment on weblog, as I do more often these days, I'd like to be notified when someone else posts to the same item, or perhaps the same weblog. It would automate something I do manually now. It would require a lot of cooperation to make such a feature work.

Doesn't Manila's Discussion Group have a feature like this? "Would you like to be notified of responses?"

The feature doesn't look difficult, just resource sensitive.

Options:

• Alert me via email
• Alert me via IM
• Expire the request after n days

Why else would a comment system alert me?

• Here's your weekly list of people, and their blogs, who posted on topics like the ones upon which you commented.
• Based on our internal Googler of the original post and the other comments in the thread, you might be very interested in these other posts on this weblog and these other weblogs.
• There are more than 5 posts after yours in this thread; click here to see them.
• Here's a consolidated follow-up list for all the comments you made this month across all the weblogs we serve.

[a klog apart:  Blue Sky Radio]

JD spent the day at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley. I'm jealous. It's in my backyard so I should drop by.

 [aka klogs]