Arcane Gazebo

MetaFilter Half-Life

My post about the liquid nitrogen incident drew a few links from other blogs, with a majority of hits coming from MetaFilter. This was great fodder for my obsession with site statistics, and the MeFi-driven traffic spike was especially interesting: it looks just like an excitation process in physics, with a saturation region that lasted about half an hour and then an exponential decay with about a 90 minute half-life.

There was a long tail that remained after many time constants; I suspect there are a couple different populations of MeFi readers, one that visits the site about once an hour and another that visits much less often, maybe once a day.