Considering the rush of major news stories this past weekend and today, we have created several new instances of Slurp140 to track breaking news:

1. Keith Olbermann abruptly ends “Countdown” and leaves MSNBC: Twitter Stats:

Total # of Tweets on Jan 21st: 13,771
Highest # of Tweets / Hour: 6,451 on January 21st
Cumulative Total # of Tweets: 34,956
Total # of People: 17,327

Whether or not you are a fan of the show or agree with his politics, for anyone interested in studying how the media reports on itself- Olbermann’s unexpected announcement Friday evening presents and interesting case study. In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, Chris Hayes (who was sitting in for Rachael Maddow) had the unfortunate task of reporting news that nobody was really interested in. With only CNN’s Anderson Cooper addressing the announcement live, (unable to determine if Fox covered anything about it live Friday evening)  many people turned to Twitter to express their opinions and speculate on causes / motives and potential fallout. With rumors now circulating that Olbermann’s exit contract prohibits him from returning to TV for anywhere from 4-6 months, we predict that Olbermann’s next tweet will lead to another dramatic spike in activity: http://www.slurp140.com/countdown/ 

2. What’s Next D.C. Conference:  For those attending or follow today’s tech conference we created an instance of Slurp140  to follow the action. At midway point, our Slurp140 What’s Next DC tracker has logged 1,027 Tweets by 229 people (12:25pm): http://www.slurp140.com/whatsnextdc/ 

3.  State of the Union Address: If you haven’t already seen what the White House has done with their  webpage and social media presence for SOTU, we highly recommend giving it a look. Hopefully we can all agree that regardless of your politics, these kind of government efforts towards outreach and transparency are good policy.  If you are looking for an uncensored and unfiltered look into what people are talking about, check out Slurp140. We have embedded the White House’s Ustream channel so you can follow the speech live. Since we started tracking Tweets at 10:00 am this morning, we have recorded 1,925 Tweets by 1,396 people. http://www.slurp140.com/sotu/ 

If you notice any surprising trends or particularly pithy tweets from one of the streams, please let us know!