It seems that my prediction about buzz was pretty much on the money. iPhone buzz jumped to 1.4% yesterday (launch day). The thing is all over TechMeme and Tailrank. A new part of the story which I haven't read elsewhere yet is iPhone spam. I received an email with the text 'AT&T has activated X's new iPhone, the number is...' I'm not sure if this was generated via the set up process, or if it was hand rolled. The fact that it mentions AT&T suggests the former.
It is probably worth pointing out the case for NLP in the context of buzz monitoring. How would you surface all the blog posts from people who now own an iPhone? A keyword approach is going to be inaccurate. A few searches on Technorati for 'bought iphone' or 'my iphone' demonstrate this. Being able to pull out the type of relationships that Powerset talks about is the way to go.
I notice that Cymfony has a position open for a computational linguist. It has been interesting to track the transformations both BuzzMetrics and Cymfony have undergone post acquisition (by TNS and Nielsen respectively). A cursory review of their websites suggests that Cymfony is racing ahead. Expect a deeper dive on this competition a little later on.