Similar References
On the World Wide Web, a similar phenomenon can occur, when a web site catches the attention of a large number of people, and gets an unexpected and overloading surge of traffic. This usage was first coined by John Pettitt of Beyond.com in 1996. Multiple other terms for the phenomenon exist, often coming from the name of a particular prominent, high-traffic site whose normal base of viewers can constitute a flash crowd when directed to a less famous website. Notorious examples include the "Slashdot effect", the "Instalanche" (when a smaller site gets links by the popular blog Instapundit), or a website being "Farked" or Drudged (where the target site is crashed due to the large number of hits in a short time).
An episode of CSI: Miami, "Murder in a Flash" centers on a flash mob which is a very similar idea, albeit produced by standard transportation. A large group of people are gathered together by e-mails and text messages in a place identified by GPS coordinates.
Read more about this topic: Flash Crowd
Famous quotes containing the word similar:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
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