Thanks to local area tech blogger and author, Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller. I guess Brett’s busy — and I couldn’t find an e-mail to let him know — so I figured it’d be fun to let y’all know why you probably got more traffic today than you might otherwise.

What’s Slashdotted? (and if you’re a showoff geek, then you’ll want to write it like this: /. )

A slash and a dot. Clever, huh?)

You get Slashdotted when someone writes an article, as Roblimo did, and it’s featured at Slashdot.org which is a massive site for techies, geeks, and their groupies. Since these folks don’t do anything but surf the Internets ™ all day and night looking for porn and have less than demanding jobs (JK JK), they have nothing to do but surf every link posted to the forum.

The effect can be pretty noticeable and the phenom is called the ‘Slashdot Effect’: thousands of visitors may show up to a site and, for smaller sites, this can slow them or put you over your bandwidth limit for the day, if not the whole month.

So, everyone give a great big shout out and thanks to Rob for helping put TampaBLAB on the tech community map. And, of course, shower Brett with wads of cash and pearl necklaces, ‘k? Afterall, he implemented the great idea — at Tommy’s urging. So while we are at it, throw kudos Tommy’s (Sticks of Fire) way, too. He’s a model of generosity and community-building, if I’ve ever seen one.

I thought Sticks of Fire was mentioned in Rob’s interesting article, Building the “Social Internet