Mike Arrington of TechCrunch complains that the traffic of TechCrunch has become so big that it regularly brings down the sites of web services and applications he writes about. Furthermore, the traffic doesn’t seem to stick, as the thousands of users skim through the sites and quickly move on in hunger of more shiny new things.

The second problem is easier to address. The thing is, blog form - a simple chronological list of posts - is great for finding out new things, but it’s horrible for finding the information you need. Readers of TechCrunch don’t remember what they’ve seen on the site the day before, let alone a couple of months ago. That’s one of the reasons TechCrunch’s traffic doesn’t translate to regular users on web startups. The way to at least partially solve this is to add a more structured way to present posts; categorized, sorted, neat and tidy. Think Categoriz, only with links leading to blog posts instead of the actual services. This will enable users to find reviewed startups, apps and services based on their interests, instead of simply looking at a long chronological list. In any case, this is what you can - among other things - expect here on franticindustries soon.

There has been a couple of suggestions from readers about the first problem, and they’re nicely rounded up over at Deep Jive Interests. However, my suggestion to Mike is that he hires an expert on web-hosting to write a guest post which would explain what exactly startups must do in order to avoid downtime due to traffic surges. It might seem simple, and it is quite trivial for simple sites like this one: it’s just a matter of getting good hosting. But for fairly complex services with AJAX, Flash, lots of user requests and database queries and whatnot, an expert’s opinion might prove very valuable, and if it’s present on TechCrunch, startups will definitely notice and hopefully act accordingly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Web, Web 2.0, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.