tecznotes

This is kind of neat:

Late last night, Slashdot linked to a Site Pro News article about 10 good CSS resources. Today, the article and its contents (WPDFD, Glish, the offical spec and others) absolutely freaking dominate Del.icio.us Popular, as seen in Vox Delicii, above. (If you're reading this more than a few days after I posted it, hit "Back one week/day" a few times after the jump)

When I first posted Vox, I expected to see users "flock to stories linked from Slashdot or BoingBoing", but not swings as wild as this. Aside from the Slashdot effect, is there something more going on here, like a Del.icio.us Popular feedback effect? I certainly don't think it's a Vox feedback effect; here's the traffic stats since it was launched:

So here are two questions I would like to have answered, after some more data builds up:

1. Is there a pattern to the kinds of sites that get the heaviest traffic? If they tend to be list or surveys, it might indicate that Del is being used as a meta-bookmarking service, and that highly-popular bookmarks are themselves pointers to the real content. Here, there seems to be a halo effect, from the Site Pro News to the linked sites, each of which has individually been around for ages.
2. Where do the links come from? There are a few URL tastemakers such as Slashdot, BoingBoing, Waxy, or Kottke. but then there are these guys ("Del.icio.us users who bookmark helpful/timely URLs"), none of whose usernames I recognize. Are they top users because they are quick on the draw, or because other users look to them for interesting places?