According to AT&T’ second-quarter earnings report, they activated a whopping 146,000 iPhones in the first two days – apparently everyone else was still on hold with their Customer Service Dept.
Investors, finally recognizing that Apple partnering with AT&T was a really stupid idea, pulled out at an alarming rate to drop the stock price by $5.70 (I’m sure it’ll be back up soon though).
My latest project – The Daily Spike – is finally nearing completion. Here is the spike page for the information above – it’s all about the iPhone story.
The Daily Spike monitors the blogosphere to find hot stories (not unlike techmeme, tailrank and some others), where we differ is that we don’t focus on A-List blogs or on traditional news sources – we focus on who has the best story based on which posts are being linked to and which are the most relevant for the story. In other words, write well and get linked to and you’ll show up as a source for the story. The other major difference with The Daily Spike is that our goal is to provide bloggers with all the information they need to write a complete, fully researched post about the story.
To do this, we collect all the links from the current posts and organize them for you. If there are common links to websites, they show up under “Related Links”, if there are common links to video, audio, pdf’s, etc, they will show up under “Media Links”. The “Top Blog Posts” are the top 5 most linked to and most relevant posts for the story while the “Headlines” are the most recent posts that are about the story. The “Associated Terms” provide additional, potentially related terms to look into – and link to TagJungle, where you’ll get only the posts that are relevant for the search term.
We still have several things to do before we fully launch, one of which is dealing with some issues of multiple feeds for the same blog, content aggregators, and feedburner. All of which cause a noticeable problem: duplicate content. I’m going to get those things all cleaned up, but for now I’m still tweaking the sensitivity of the Spike monitor.
For now, you can see more spikes in my Google Reader shared items here, or pick up the feed here. I’ve also set up a test account on Twitter that directly posts every spike, here. I’m working on a Facebook application as well.
Other features that are currently in work include, categorizing every post/spike based on topic and language and we’ve almost got a new database server ready to go that will significantly improve the speed of the site. If you dig into these links (which would be really cool of you 
), please keep in mind that this isn’t even a beta release yet – it’s more of a teaser alpha and I just want to share what we’ve been building. Any feedback is welcome!
