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I know this may not be of interest to anyone but me. Thing is, it's so interesting to me I'm pretty much forced to share it.
First of all, here's what two large traffic events do to the charts in Google Analytics:

See any trends there? Me neither. With huge spikes like the ones I received this week and back in August, the day to day and month-to-month trends are flattened out to the point where the charts are useless. Here's the space in between those two dates:

Look! Trends!

Referrers

Taking the same 3 day period from last year, I received 551 visits via 78 referring (not direct/not search engine) sources. From March 5 through March 7th this year I received 24,270 visits via 228 sources.

To illustrate the concentrated power of the Slashdot link, here I've presented the top twenty referrers from the past twelve months. The bold domains are all NEW to the past week:

Source		Visits	Pages/Visit
1.	images.google.com	49,960	5.76
2.	gorillamask.net	10,270	1.09
3.	slashdot.org	8,910	1.22
4.	images.google.co.uk	7,516	6.80
5.	images.google.ca	4,206	6.25
6.	images.google.de	3,734	6.93
7.	it.slashdot.org	3,582	1.23
8.	tech.wp.pl	3,163	1.09
9.	dailytech.com	2,398	1.22
10.	images.google.pl	2,376	7.59
11.	rlslog.net	1,867	1.20
12.	reddit.com	1,801	1.15
13.	images.google.com.au	1,718	5.77
14.	images.google.com.mx	1,571	12.58
15.	images.google.nl	1,144	7.18
16.	en.wikipedia.org	1,115	1.21
17.	trugroovez.com	1,108	8.15
18.	images.google.fr	1,049	5.22
19.	images.google.com.br	945	8.05
20.	google.com	915	2.73

For what it's worth, Google.com there at #20 is for the Google homepage and not Google search. Google search, in that same period, generated 136,591 visitors. Google owns my traffic.

Some data transfer numbers

I serve just text (Javascript, CSS and HTML) off of my main web server, I do my best to scale things down code wise and I Gzip most of that content- even still I served 1.18GB of data on Thursday alone. From Wednesday through Friday (the span of the the entire "event") I served 3.14 GB of text.

Thankfully, I moved all my image hosting over to Amazon S3 a few months ago, because in the three days of the event I served a total of 10.35GB of images*. That's a little under 1/2 of my normal monthly total.

Third Parties

Compete, sadly, misses the bump in their daily attention graph:

Alexa, however, recognizes the bump, moving me up from around 243,000 last month to 71,014 on Wednesday and finally #32,527 on Thursday.

Multiples

Comparing, arbitrarily, March 6, 2008 to March 6, 2007 we get the following multiples

Metric	2008	2007	increase
Visits	13,680	561	+2,338.50%
Pageviews	20,353	4,127	+393.17%

All the metrics aren't good, of course. The paltry 1.49 Pages per Visit I got this week kills me, especially when compared to the robust 7.36 I got the same day last year (a drop-off of -79.78% ouch.)

Still, would I take that kind of traffic bump again? Of course, especially if I could get those 13,000 people to all visit 7 pages

*I love S3. That traffic spike cost me all of two bucks. Before, since I was always bursting at the seams with data transfer all of that would have gone into overages and would have cost me some outrageous sum.