Everyone (ok, all techies) remembers the Slashdot effect: it’s when your website makes it to the front page of slashdot and instantly causes a gazillion people to come and check it out.
Best case scenario … your server holds on for a few minutes.
Normal scenario … it goes down in a few seconds.
Just like the Web 2.0 has lots of equivalents in terms of security 2.0, design 2.0, identity 2.0, etc, etc … I think Digg.com is the new Slashdot. It does a lot of what Slashdot allowed us to do … read common stories, comment on them and basically crash lots of webservers due to excess traffic … but it also lets you vote on stories (you digg them, so they get dugg, get it?!). And a few other toys, so someone can look at stories you dugg, stories you presented for digging and look at stories that haven’t gotten enough digg’s (haven’t been dugg enough) so aren’t on the front page.
This whole digg/dugg business does two things …
1) Gets you confused for the first few minutes
2) Gets you all nostalgic about dig dug, that 80s game!
Check it out.