I'm sorry you typed all that, but I'm afraid that you're the one not getting it. If you read the first sentence of my post you can see that I'm explicitly talking about the tool bar update not being done.
Most certainly at some point along the line traffic and SERP rankings (if they had any) would have been dropping off as it moved down in PR. Now, how drastically would depend on if they tripped other factors to anger the Google Gods (cause PR ain't the only calculation, right?) If I am brought into a 'Code Red' situation, PR0 tells me there may be a problem, but that's about it... I have to start checking indexation, rankings and empirical data to start understanding what has gone ary So monitoring your rankings will usually tell the picture best… considering rankings=traffic (if we’ve done our MW/Phrase research) then rankings is what should be considered one of the Primary Indicators
If You are refering to the fact that a lot of serious sites lost PR And now its starting to return i agree The gypsy I have one site I maintain at work it got the mysterious zaping back to zero on the home page now its returning I most definatly dont see a correlation between serps & the mysterious Zapping to Zero as Serps have improved or remained steady consistently over th e last 6 months including the last few days the site did gain a lot of internal pr on second level pages relative to its previous PR on the home page that is now returning to what seems to be exactly the same as before this update.
Often 'jumping' as you describe it means some DC shuffles during the whole update process.... either way, it's TBPR and not really going to tell you much Hmmmm .. Oh yeah... ( Dave roots through drawers) a few recent Matt Cutts sightings; http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/ or how about and http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-info-on-pagerank/ and of course ME; http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/The-Google-Toolbar-PageRank-Demystified.html Some more to chew on... fun ain't it?
ha ha ha... potential clients that are panicking or sites that have tanked etc... for whatever reason I do tend to avoid them I must say though...
Ahh ok...lol I thought there was some official meaning.... Yea there are a lot of " code red " threads in the google forum