Fun graph

I love Rich Apodaca’s idea of “name that graph” (example). I am not competing, but just occasionally a bit of fun:
slashdot1.png
Shouldn’t be hard

This entry was posted in fun, puzzles. Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Fun graph

  1. Number of visitors of your blog?

  2. No, that can’t be the slashdot effect… ?!?! The server broke down after online twice the normal amount of hits?

  3. Those spikes DO occur on Blog Sites as a result of some stimulating discussions. Take a look at the spike on this graph http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=127. That spike occurred as a result of Peter’s posting: http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=260. It’s clear from the traffic following that we likely never cleaned that up despite my comments here (it took four days for me to get back from a week of travel and set up a blog: http://www.chemspider.com/blog/?p=6.
    So…maybe a contentious post drew some traffic? Maybe it was matching the activity that found it’s way to ChemSpider?

  4. pm286 says:

    (1) (2) (3)
    If you are smart and inspired you should be able to deduce the answer. There are some clues.
    It’s not related to Chemspider

  5. Rich Apodaca says:

    Hmm, it’s clearly an Alexa graph, and they’re known for Web traffic statistics. There’s a twofold spike in activity sometime in the past.
    The image is called “slashdot1.png”, but there’s no metadata and nothing funny in the HTML.
    This is a graph of some Website’s activity and it has something to do with the /. effect…
    Can I buy a vowel?

  6. Jim Downing says:

    Egon’s fundamentally right, it’s a graph of page hits expressed as reach (N.B. Alexa’s definition of reach is different to feedburner’s definition of reach): –
    Some reach
    There’s some misdirection here, though – it’s not actually PMR’s traffic that’s shown, but the traffic for the entire cam.ac.uk domain.

  7. pm286 says:

    (7) Jim is right. I was unable to restrict the analysis to wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk and this was for the whole of cam.ac.uk (anyone can repeat this). The slashdot effect for our server doubled the whole traffic for the university. I wonder if anyone noticed.

  8. sea36 says:

    I’m afraid it looks like you’re all confusing correlation with cause…
    The same day as Peter hit slashdot, the a new set of spectacularly clear images from the Institute of Astronomy got a 2 minute slot on BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6975961.stm), and hit much of the rest of the web in the following week… If you look at the University’s internal traffic stats (http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/network/usage/janet/sum/acct/2007.html) you can see a huge spike for Astronomy around that time, but Chemistry traffic appears normal.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *