Slashdot, the collaborative reporting site for the technical elite, reported yesterday that a Web site called VisitorVille Intelligence released information on how employees at some big companies used the World Wide Web based on the companies’ Web monitoring efforts. This combination of employees’ online habits, company monitoring and the Net is right up my alley, so I clicked on over to VisitorVille Intelligence, only to find myself redirected to another site with a brief message noting that the Slashdot reference had generated so much traffic that Visitorville’s server had crashed. The note asks visitors to bookmark the site and check back later after the “/. effect has subsided.”

Every site wants traffic. How prepared are these organizations for the attention they crave?

The Slashdot item suggests that the report groups company employees to determine that Microsoft employees use Google for their searches far more than they use their own MSN search engine, that Deutsch Telecom AG employees are the biggest users of Linux, and that only 39% of Sun Microsystems employees use the SunOS operating system. Apparently the report also covers employees at the White House, the United Nations, IBM, and The New York Times. I won’t know what their habits are, though, until the server comes back up.