Clotho: A Slashdotting, Once Removed

Many of you will already be familiar with Slashdot, a website that posts "news for nerds" touching on many topics, including new gadgets, video games, biology, physics, politics, copyright and other topics that are of interest to the nerdy. The site is so popular, and receives so much traffic, that when there is a link from a front-page article to another website, that website often can't handle the huge traffic generated from Slashdot and goes down in flames. This is referred to as being "slashdotted".

Some of the work that my company, Clotho Advanced Media, Inc. does for UW-Madison is fairly innovative, and Preston (my brother and Clotho's chief architect) was at an Accelerate Madison gathering last night, and spoke to reporters, and was quoted in an article about how video games can be used to teach, and the article linked to Clotho's main website.

That article was then linked from Slashdot, because news about how video games can be used to teach is exactly the sort of thing that Slashdot likes to link to. So, not quite a slashdotting, but only one degree of separation away from one. Maybe next time.

Now, that was enough to put some of us at the office into a flurry of activity. We make a product that converts MediaSite video presentations into Flash video presentations, so we'd like to take the video of last night's presentation and present that online as quickly as possible. In addition, the application development that Preston indirectly refers to using the Neverwinter Nights game engine is my project for the UW-Madison, which is only just getting started, and I don't have anything to show yet.

So, no pressure.