Quantifying “holy shit”

Traffic for DFL throughout its active lifetime: from August 15, when I started it, to August 31, when I wrote the last entry:

DFL traffic

It was posted to MetaFilter the night of August 22/23, which provided a slight uptick from the west coast on the 22nd. The traffic on the 23rd was wholly MeFi- and blog-driven. By the afternoon of the 24th the Reuters article had been filed and had begun to disseminate among online news sources, including Yahoo! News. From there other news organizations — if they could get a hold of me, since I was getting six to ten media requests every morning, too many for me to respond to — began picking up on the story.

This is what snowballing looks like.