Ok, now I'm confused

I’ve been looking at my web server log analysis and I have three peaks in my graphs for the last few days.

The first big peak, 6,000 hits per hour, was on 28th March when my relationship break-up post was on the front page of digg. The traffic then tailed off and dropped down to around 130 hits an hour on the 30th.

The second peak, of 500 hits per hour, occurred when a link was posted on The Register and stayed on its front page for a while. This traffic then tailed off on the 31st and dropped to around 90 hits per hour….

Then sometime on the 31st the traffic spiked again, rising back up to over 200 hits per hour, and the referrer graph started to show “direct hits”, i.e. no referrer as the most common referrer. Prior to that the referrer graph was clearly showing the digg.com and The Register hits.

This third wave confuses me. It’s slowing down now but the referrer graph still shows that almost half of all hits are “direct hits”. So, where are you all coming from and why is this blog still of interest?