Somehow I missed this post on reddit, but Mark Milian of the LA Times technology blog didn't:
Thanks to some attention from Reddit, the social news website, Help a Virgin has seen a major surge in Web traffic. The site has been up since at least the summer (the last time it was updated was July), but after it hit Reddit's front page on Sunday, the traffic counter has more than doubled -- to 80,000 and rising. At this rate, his scheme won't succeed (he wouldn't even get half the target number) so he'll definitely need some additional attention. (He didn't respond to my e-mail requests for an interview, but, then again, I'm not a woman.)In other news, reddit will also help make your goat photos famous:
A photo of mountain goats scaling a cliff, featured on Roger Eickholt's Flickr page, was all the rage on Monday. It was plastered on social media sites and around the blogosphere, driving more than 200,000 people to view it. [...]Welcome to reddit, Roger.When Eickholt analyzed Flickr's link referral page to make sense of his newfound prominence, Reddit.com topped the list. What is Reddit, you ask? "This website talks about current events and stuff like that, I guess," said Eickholt. "I have no idea. I've never really been to those websites before."
Reddit, like all social media websites, is serendipitous. Few know what type of photograph, video or news bit is going to explode, and what's going to fizzle. And often times, content creators aren't the ones who submit their own links -- they don't discover that their photos had struck gold until later. "It just seems so random," Eickholt said. "You never know what's going to take off like that."