"Flash Crowd" -- another science fiction word in real-world use

[Mullins, Bill]

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goodman <dsgood at IPHOUSE.COM>
> Organization: Self
> Subject:      "Flash Crowd"  -- another science fiction word
> in real-world use
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
>
> So why am I a happy camper? We survived an unprecedented
> triple flash crowd and logged it all. As it turns out, two of
> the faculty members in my Dept., Maarten van Steen and
> Guillaume Pierre, are doing research on coping with flash
> crowds. The research issues include how many replicas to set
> up, where to place them, how fast to deploy them, and how to
> do it automatically, in real time, and at minimum cost. To
> simulate proposed algorithms, you need data about real flash
> crowds and real attacks, preferably at the same time.
> http://electoral-vote.com
>
> Flash Crowd
[wikipedia entry follows]
>
> Another similar phenomenon is the Flash mob.
>


I hope you send this along to Malcolm Farmer M.J.Farmer at bham.ac.uk
at the OED Science Fiction Project
http://www.jessesword.com/SF/sf_citations.shtml
Neither Flash Crowd nor Flash Mob are listed in their collection of
Science Fiction terms, for which they are actively looking for antedates.

> On the World Wide Web, a similar phenomenon can occur, when
> some web site catches the attention of a large number of
> people, and gets an unexpected and overloading surge of
> traffic: a notorious example is the Slashdot effect.

See also the "Instalanch", which is what happens when the blog
www.instapundit.com links to your site.