Perhaps one minor bonus to HackerSlide for now is anyone can take the data collected. The URLs for the JSON archives are formatted like: http://hackerslide.com/data/2012-11-01-23.json (YYYY-MM-DD-HH) although even better long term are the once a day versions, e.g.: http://hackerslide.com/data/2012-11-01.json
I've learnt two things from this project in particular. First, that most similar projects don't seem to stick around very long (the Reddit one it was based on disappeared after a few months as have several others - http://hckrnews.com/ is an exception I can recall). Second, these tools seem to be popular at first but then rarely used over time. Luckily I still find it useful to catch up after vacations, etc ;-)