I'm pretty sure, based on conversations with founders, that this spike in applications wasn't due to people learning of our existence for the first time. Most people we interviewed seemed to have known about us for a while.
I don't think application numbers are much correlated with News.YC traffic either. I think most people who come here are just looking for what people found at Reddit 3 years ago.
I guess the test is: Were the pitches clustering more around those ideas?
One more test I can think of: If, as expected, the recession is still bottoming at the Spring deadline then the numbers (gross or percent change) should be comparable if that craziness is driving folks, in swarms it seems, to the founder path. However, if it was "Startup Ideas...", then, as a singular event, the growth should be closer to a normal rate if not an overall decline in gross from the Winter.
Care to make a guess which way it will go?
Maybe the spike wasn't, but my application was. I never heard of YC until three days before the deadline. It's a coincidence that I was already working on a new app so I had a reason to apply.
Drawing conclusions from a single data point, proposals received in October, is as faulty as deciding the world is careening into climatic disaster based on drops in temperature measured in fractions of a degree C over the last few years.
The interviewees might be a biased sample of applicants, though. I guess you could get some insight into that by looking at data on the age distribution of the the accounts that applied, and comparing that to previous cycles. But I suppose you have better things to do :)