I promised a friend that we've have the data related to SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards posted today and I'd hate to dissapoint. I'm providing statistics from launch in the early morning of Tuesday, March 28 to today - a total of 10 days (8 weekdays).

Traffic (unique visits):

March 28, 2006 Tue    19,636
March 29, 2006 Wed    20,667
March 30, 2006 Thu    12,825
March 31, 2006 Fri    7,777
April 01, 2006 Sat    4,061
April 02, 2006 Sun    3,838
April 03, 2006 Mon    6,221
April 04, 2006 Tue    5,518
April 05, 2006 Wed    5,126
April 06, 2006 Thu    3,992 (until 3:20pm PDT)

Referring Links:

11,066 referring URLs sent traffic, from 2477 unique domains
Top 25 Referrers:

1. http://digg.com
2. http://del.icio.us
3. http://www.cssbeauty.com
4. http://www.stumbleupon.com
5. http://cssmania.com
6. http://www.nnm.ru
7. http://www.pixelsurgeon.com
8. http://blog.searchenginewatch.com
9. http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com
10. http://tek.sapo.pt
11. http://www.msnbc.msn.com
12. http://www.downloadsquad.com
13. http://popurls.com
14. http://doci.nnm.ru               
15. http://www.marketingfacts.nl
16. http://cssbeauty.com
17. http://www.netvibes.com
18. http://solidot.org             
19. http://blog.donews.com
20. http://www.micropersuasion.com
21. http://mail.google.com
22. http://www.blinklist.com
23. http://blog.centraldesktop.com
24. http://www.postshow.net
25. http://www.furl.net

#22 is pretty interesting, but my favorite referrer, who isn't on the list, was Alexa's "Movers & Shakers" page. We're at #9 with a 1,600% increase in traffic:

As far as search engine stats, it's still too early to say. Yahoo!'s reporting 17,400 links (using the last page method to get greater accuracy). Google is ranking the site #3 for Web 2.0 Awards, so it's possible we've dodged the sandbox, but I won't have any true data until it's been indexed for at least 3 weeks. I think it fits the model of "topical phenomenon" fairly well, but my secret hope is that the domain does get sandboxed (box testing is the primary reason we launched it on its own domain rather than as an SEOmoz article).

As I have more cool stats, I'll be posting them in this entry or the comments below - the research portion of the awards for SEO purposes was a major part of the project, and I plan to make all of that information public for SEOs to reference. It should certainly help bolster the case for a major, pressworthy launch as a methodology for link growth, rather than a traditional link building/requesting campaign.