A friend works with cats, cats, cats all day long and took these pictures:
Survival instinct "takes hold."
Why is it the most cute must suffer the most?
Release me so I can rip your throat out
I have come to your planet to kill you.
Why did I trust you?!
Dip me again and I'll shrivel to nothing!
I will haunt your nightmares forever!
Starting in late September, the New York Times apparently began increasing how frequently it moved older articles off its "Most Popular" page, making room for newer articles to appear more rapidly on the list. Several bloggers have speculated that this is a "Digg Effect" of its own kind, where large, well-established sites take their cues from the success of younger sites like Digg. Digg.com already has over 75% as many page views at the Times as of July, 2007
Digg is well-known to have fresh articles appear on its home page by the minute, and this is part of its appeal. The NYT apparently noticed more visitors going to the most popular page and not clicking on any links, correctly surmising there wasn't anything new enough since the last time the visitor came to that page. This step by the Times follows their adding social media links to many articles in late in 2006 (Time Surrenders to Social News), shortly after Digg broke into the list of top 20 most visited sites on the web in barely over two years of operation (digg post on that news).
Some have hypothesized the Times may have begun testing after the Onion article 'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart got their attention ...
It also appears the NYT may be watching the frequency of visits to the most popular page to try to fine tune how frequently new articles should appear on the list, in addition to surveying how often algorithms on other sites like digg cause new articles to appear.
This logo design blogger is running an excellent example of a contest that anyone can copy and create their own variation of to promote their website. Northern Ireland logo designer David Airey is offering more than $4,000 in prizes in his version of this contest. Contest details here. (Addendum: here's a variation that is also an incredibly effective contest for getting traffic and subscribers.)
He's offering a wide variety of prizes, and giving you entries for linking and/or subscribing (feed) to his website. (I believe if you did this in the U.S., you would have to provide a way for entries to be had without requiring anything of entrants other than providing contact information of some kind.) You get extra entries for linking to prize providers.
In case you don't see how this works, by making the site and contest entry page highly visible, and offering a reward for linking to prize providers, it becomes worth it for many to be a prize provider.
Logically, any company that grows too fast is going to have service issues. What does "too fast" mean?
Services that get a lot of press on social media sites (like Digg) often get a ton of new clients rapidly. Call it Flashcrowds 2.0, or the Digg Effect 2.0 --- when a business can't handle the increased load from new clients who heard about them social media and blog sites. Looks like MediaTemple hosting is the latest victim of it. (Flashcrowds on the web are when huge numbers of visitors arrive at a web site in a short time frame.)
They're getting an increasing number of posts from clients complaining about service problems. In several cases, (here and here, for example) the posters who complained and said they would leave have decided to stay on with MediaTemple, but the service problems being documented around the web (scroll down to read the most current posts here) seem to indicate they may have grown far too fast.
The upside for folks searching for hosts is that lots of posters document their experiences, and recommend the best hosts they've found. One that looks good I hadn't heard of before is Deru.
