For more than five hours today the so-called Slashdot effect was completely absent on the internet. Why? Because Slashdot.org, the extremely popular technology news website that inspired Kevin Rose to create Digg, was according to our monitoring unavailable from 09:38 CET this morning (03:38 US EST) and only came back up a few minutes ago (14:48 CET, 08:48 US EST).

Sourceforge (Sourceforge.net), which owns Slashdot, was also unreachable.

The Register should have credit for reporting first on this (they even contacted us here at Pingdom for a quote).

It’s a common scenario: A new website launches after having built up a lot of hype around its service or product, only to almost immediately crash due to overwhelming traffic. These launch troubles are almost always scalability-related.

We see this happening a lot. It may sound like a luxury problem (wow, too many users!), but think about it: If you’ve created something special and spent lots of effort building up expectations and buzz around your product, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of people finally trying it out, do you?

Here are some real-world launch troubles from 2008, and advice on how to avoid these kinds of problems.

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Since 2002, Google has honored 25 historical people with custom-made versions of the Google logo, displayed for one day on the Google homepage.

Judging by the people Google have selected so far, don’t expect any WWF wrestling stars to show up anytime soon. It’s an elite collection of highly influential scientists, artist and architects who have made their mark on human history and culture.

Here they are, all 25 of them, in reverse chronological order.

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Every year, companies find that someone has registered domain names involving their trademarks, or variations of their domain names that are confusingly similar to the original. If a solution can’t be found by talking to the registrant of the offending domain name(s), a formal dispute usually follows.

WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization (an agency of the UN), has an arbitration and mediation center for domain disputes, and they continually publish the results of these disputes, as well as related facts and figures.

We have summarized some of the most interesting data in this article, and we have also tried to figure out the underlying reason for the increase in domain disputes. Well, at least we have a pretty good theory involving Google AdSense…

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Many of the major websites have localized versions of their pages for different countries. Most of the time it’s just a plain translation of their “regular” website (for example Apple Japan, Yahoo Japan and MSN Japan, to name just a few), but sometimes localization is taken a BIG step further.

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First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks!

We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we won’t be updating the blog until next Monday (December 29), here is a selection of our very best and most popular posts from 2008 to keep you entertained in the meantime.

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