 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).