In less-than-near-future SF, the antagonists in Alastair Reynolds' _Century Rain_, the "Slashers", were supposed to be the intellectual descendants of Slashdotters. From Wikipedia: ``...they trace their existence back to "an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the first computer networks", whose symbol was a slash and a dot.''

I had to groan a bit at this gratuitous reference in an otherwise tight novel. :)

The verb "slashdotted" is even more common. I recall seeing it at least once in a Charles Stross novel or two, and in numerous other near-future SF.

I once submitted a friend's blog entry to slashdot. It was picked for the front page. I can't remember exactly how it works, but you get an email or a notice on the site saying your story will appear shortly.

I was in my friend's living room at the time, sitting near the laptop on the end of an ADSL connection that served his blog.

"Ummmm.... I think i've done a baaaaad thing."

That lil' ol' laptop was absolutely hammered for the next day, even after moving the images, etc., on to 'proper' servers and making the site static.

I submitted my review of of the Unicomp Customizer (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/05/29/1334258/Review-o...) years ago, and I think that day remains the most traffic I've ever gotten. Granted, it's a generic Wordpress.com blog and thus not susceptible to Slashdotting, but I still remember looking at the traffic spike and going, "Wow."

I'm fairly certain it was mentioned by a character in an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's had reverberations across the geek ethos.

It was; Neil and I actually talked about that at one point. Our first email exchange ran something along the lines of me saying my (then baby) first born had a Sandman mobile above her crib; Neil's reply "And my son's home page is Slashdot"