Encyclopedia of Life — Sometimes it's better not to be first

The site (www.eol.org) made its debut this past Tuesday and quickly crashed.

It did manage to get back up later that afternoon, logging 11.5 million hits over 5-1/2 hours including two hours of down time.

Today should be smoother.

Long story short: The first 30,000 pages (of an expected 1.8 million), written by an international team of scientists, are up.

Nice touch: A sliding button that you can move to choose how much detail you want.

Too bad I don't have one of those, huh?