There’s an effect in chaos theory called the Butterfly Effect— often described as how the movements of a butterfly in Brazil can cause (or prevent) a storm in Texas. It refers to how a tiny effect can have a massive consequence, and has been the subject of books, films and television programmes.
In the age of Web2.0 and user generated content, there’s something new about the effect of traffic flows on the Internet.
In the earlier days of the web, when websites tended to be ‘closed shops’ with possibly one or two external links to related websites, the web tended to be, from the users’ point of view, a bunch of connections from the user to the websites. It was almost as though we, the users, were sat at the hub of an international network, with thousands of connections reaching out across the web. (There’s a certain irony to how this illusion comes from an anthropocentric view of a global decentralised network— not unlike the pre-Copernican idea of the Earth being the centre of the universe simply because it looks like everything revolves around us.) We were aware that there were other links connecting everything to everything else, but they weren’t particularly important or relevant to us.
Now, in the so called Web 2.0 era, where content is frequently contributed or edited by users, or information is pulled from a number of different sites onto a single page, the truly erratic nature of the ebbs and flows of traffic over the internet has become more visible to web users; it no longer feels so much as though we’re sat at the centre of our own web, but just a part of the flow of traffic.
The most obvious artefact of the rushes of online traffic is what’s been termed “the Slashdot effect” or alternatively the “Digg effect” (or being “Dugg”), “Farked”, “Goon rushed”, “Wanged” or a number of other effects (the name simply depends on the source of the web traffic; the actual effect is the same.) This happens when a popular, high-traffic site like Dogg or Slashdot links to a page on a smaller website, which ends up sending them more traffic than their site can handle (whether that’s in terms of more bandwidth being demanded than is physically available to their server, overloading the connection between the server and the internet, or overloading the server itself so that it can’t process the incoming requests, or for cheaper shared hosting options simply going over a site’s allocated server resources.)
If the website owner is “lucky” and one of their pages makes the front page, then it will attract a huge number of visitors to their site. However, if the server isn’t properly equipped or prepared for the rush, then the effect is similar to a Distributed Denial of Service attack; the huge number of visitors simply see an error message of some sort and are fairly unlikely to return.
While Facebook is a popular site with a huge number of users, each user only sees information relevant to their own network of friends or geographical location. Without a common front page it didn’t seem to be likely to cause similar problems with tidal waves of traffic. However, the viral nature of Facebook Applications (which can be installed and used by huge numbers of Facebook users over a short space of time) has led to similar problems, where simple but popular applications are attracting more users than they can cope with and end up costing significant amounts of money to run, but providing no obvious revenue stream to pay for their upkeep.
There is clearly an art in mastering the flows of online traffic. From the earliest days of the web, pornography has had a reputation of being freely available, and online pornography has been a multi million dollar industry for several years— accompanied by the spam emails which have been the bane of email inboxes for just as long. Today, the majority of spam still seems to be related to sex in some way; either links to pornographic sites, “adult chatrooms”, or selling viagra or other sex-related drugs. Perhaps it’s just human nature— when it’s so easy to click on a link and there are so many possible links to click on, rather than rationally analyse what’s the most informative or useful, a more instinctive mechanism drives our attention to less intellectual attractions. Perhaps it’s just that people are happier to look at something in the privacy of their own homes that they would never reach for from the top shelf of a newsagents, potentially in full view of their friends or neighbours. But advertisers have been keenly aware for decades that sex sells, and sexual imagery or simply semi-naked bodies have been used to sell pretty much everything under the sun, from cars to carpets; after all, selling sex is supposed to be “the oldest trade.”
Because of the centralising effect of popular websites (especially those like Digg or Slashdot which could include links to virtually any site on their front page, guaranteeing a huge surge in traffic even after the server has been overloaded), it only takes a single user to find a web page interesting enough to submit— that user might be a regular submitter of information, a first timer who happened to come across something interesting, or even the author themselves.) If it happens to provoke a strong enough reaction in others to comment on it (whether in agreement or disagreement isn’t really important), then it attracts more traffic.
However, the population of sites like Digg and Slashdot is a little more sophisticated than the pornography-obsessed Trekkie Monster image (although, arguably, not by much.) Rather than being driven by an insatiable lust for pornography, there are a number of hot topics which will tend to attract attention and front-page traffic. Articles which talk about video game consoles, or Apple or Linux (all of which tend to have a very passionate and vocal following) will attract attention and spark conversation and debate. If there were a formula for making the front page, the traffic it would drive would be worth a fortune in advertising, in the same way that guaranteed top page listings in Google rankings seems to be the 21st Century equivalent to the Philosophers Stone. While understanding search engine technology and mastering Search Engine Optimisation has gone from being something of a “black art” reputation to an essential string to a web designer or developers’ bow, will the next generation of SEO will be more widely oriented at dealing with “Web 2.0″ sites, rather than being tightly focussed on Google’s Pagerank system?
That said, it seems that it’s impossible to calculate or predict the formula that attracts huge volumes of traffic to a website. On something like Digg or Slashdot, it’s more a combination of the reputation of whoever creates the content in the first place, the reputation of whoever posts it to Digg or Slashdot first, and presumably the particular nature of the first butterflies to come across the piece; whether they are anonymous surfers, obsessive commenters or prolific bloggers seems to be the most significant determining factor as to whether the page will pass by relatively unnoticed, or overrun by a swarm of butterflies with the power to shut down servers across the world…
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