Things continue to move fast and furious here at SiliconANGLE, and we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what we’ve decided to term as ‘peer blogging,’ as well as the limits of our current hosting provider.

Regarding site stability and meteoric growth…

First, the important stuff: you may have noticed a bit of a slowdown last week.  Just before re-design a few weeks ago of SiliconANGLE, we auditioned about four or five different server types for their capability to smoothly and economically run a WordPressMU installation.  We eventually settled on a shared hosting plan with Bluehost because the price was right, and of the four or five solutions we tried (including GoDaddy, as well as Scott Beale’s Squidhost and Squidhost’s Cloud solution), it was the only one that worked reliably from install to implementation.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you see it) our traffic, contributions and contributor base have exploded by percentages ranging from 100% to 500% week over week in the last month. Two times today alone we’ve taken down the rest of the domains on our shared hosting plan due to our backend eating up CPU cycles during traffic spikes. We’ve disabled some background processes (nothing that should significantly interfere with the site browsing or usage experience), but it’s made it clear that we need to move to a more scalable solution pretty quickly (especially given the projects for site expansion we have in the works).

We’re auditioning a number of solutions, and looking at our various options in the cloud.  We welcome all comments on this topic – we’ve started a thread on /SAbackchan about it, so feel free to weigh in there.

Regarding site participation and contribution…

It’s been pretty amazing to see our contributor base edge up to the 100 user mark. In the last few days, we’ve crossed the threshold of triple digits, and our regular contributors (those who contribute multiple times a week) have risen up into the double digits.

Amongst our regular contributors, we now boast (along with myself and John), Sean P. Aune, James Watters, Nate D’amico, Doug Gourlay, Robert Scoble, Daisy Whitney, Hutch Carpenter, Esteban Contreras, and many of the team-members from our partner blog Broadband Census, including Andrew Feinberg, Douglas Streeks, and Ryan Womack (if I’ve left out a name or two, forgive me and chime in below).

Those that contribute bi-weekly and monthly are an even longer list – not only is our community growing, it’s active. Many of you who read us regularly are signing up to contribute and participate in our community at the rate of two to five a day (want to join in? it’s easy!)

John and I have been trying to rack our brains to come up with ways to pull the community together on a regular basis.  We do Silicon Valley area meetups, but not all our contributors live close enough or have unclouded schedules allowing them to attend.

When we installed WPMU a month ago, we had no idea the power that would be unleashed and how effective it would be.

Here’s what we’ve done so far to change things up…

We’ve gone ahead and set up Buddypress groups for each one of our editorial silos, with functionality more or less akin to a Facebook group.  Each group contains a forum, a public wire, and membership and messaging functionality.

It was useful to us for our various members self-organized into groups of interest together and which gave us an idea where everyone’s expertise and interests lay.  What was even more effective, though, turned out to be an installation of the new Prologue theme for WordPress that we’ve turned into our collaborative editorial backchannel.

For those unfamiliar with Prologue, it’s a theme for WordPress that aproximates the functionality of Twitter or Yammer, allowing you to set up a live, AJAXed, updatable microblog that’s useful, at least in the context of our setup, for matching the expertise of the various members of our community with the blog authors, and doing so with full transparency (anyone can jump in and comment, regardless of their membership or contributor status).

Several times in the couple weeks we’ve had it set up, subjects of stories we’ve been working on have commented and offered their perspective to the betterment of the post we were working on, including Louis Gray, and Cyan Bannister (the new CEO of Zivity).

We’ve just tapped the surface of the potential of this new platform, and every day we’re seeing new ways to interconnect the new points of interaction.

We’re also settling into what’s becoming a comfortable editorial voice…

Over the last few months, we’ve hit a sort of stride in the types of writing we do here.  We still adhere to the moniker “Computer Science meets Social Science,” but it took a few months to work out the news blogging instinct I’d acquired over the last several years.  Certainly we keep aware of the current trends and memes and write on them occasionally as news, but we’ve seen a unique ecosystem take shape here.

There’s a sort of symbiotic relationship between contributors that are primarily bloggers and those that are other professionals who occasionally blog here has emerged.

We have a steady stream of video posts that come in on an almost daily basis – quick briefings, like Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute and sometimes esoteric but always interesting interviews like Robert Scoble’s Building43 updates. Roundtable shows, like John McCrea’s SocialWeb.TV…

… complimenting the thought leadership pieces in the worlds of mobile apps, cloud computing and social media.  All in all, it’s a swell place to call a workplace. I’m getting to edit thoughtful essays from deep in the trenches of IT development all the way out to iPhone App and social media development.  I get to satisfy my voracious appetite for reading news constantly throughout my day.

Needless to say, I’m happy with what I’m doing, and that it’s beginning to resonate with a larger community of readers and professionals is all the more gratifying.

All that to say – thanks for reading and contributing, everyone.  Without you doing what you do, I wouldn’t be able to do what I get to do. As long as you guys keep it up, I promise I will, too.