Poor Steve Jobs Had to Go Head to Head With Weinergate in the Twitter Buzzstakes. And the Weiner Is …

It's rather surreal timing when you think about it: On the same day that Apple launched its iCloud service ("The new way to store and access your content"), the tech giant got its media thunder stolen by a tearful congressman who suddenly manned up and stopped blaming … the cloud. Remember, until Monday's hastily called afternoon press conference in which he finally took responsibility for his own actions, Rep. Weiner had been blaming his lewd crotch-shot post on some sort of hack of his Twitter and Facebook accounts -- whose data, of course, resides in the hacker-susceptible cloud. We now know that it is Weiner himself who launched that notorious shot of his underwear-clad erection into the social-media stratosphere, where it will forever orbit the political consciousness like a forlorn piece of space junk -- along with that just-released photo of a cellphone photo (could this get anymore meta-media-ish?) of his unclothed erection, courtesy of Andrew Breitbart via Sirius XM shock jocks Opie and Anthony. (Gawker, of course, has the "story"/image. Yeah, I'm not linking to it.)

Monday's hourly tweet volume for Apple (red), Weiner (orange), iCloud (purple) and @repweiner (green)

Which brings me to this week's charticle and, oh yeah, Apple. (Remember Apple?) Any sort of new Apple product launch usually dominates Twitter. But could Steve Jobs & Co. overcome the buzz saw of the mighty Weiner? Thanks to data collected and parsed by our editorial partner Trendrr, the social-media monitoring firm, we now know:

• A roll-up of Weiner-related Twitter terms (including "weiner," "#weinergate," "#weiner," etc.) racked up 184,848 tweets by the end of the day on Monday.
• According to Trendrr's estimates, 59% of tweets about Weinergate have been issued by males, 41% by females.
• We also tracked just @repweiner mentions -- including so-called @replies to the distinguished congressman from New York. On Monday alone, @repweiner appeared in 25,712 tweets.
• iCloud and #iCloud racked up just over 110,000 tweets by the end of the day on Monday.
• Interest in iCloud skews even more male than interest in Congressional penis! Trendrr estimates that 76% of tweets about iCloud have come from males, vs. 24% from females.
• The word Apple (including the hashtag #apple) racked up just over 251,000 tweets by the close of day Monday. And a roll-up of all Apple-related tweets tracked by Trendrr on Monday (including tweets that mentioned, for example, "iCloud" or "#icloud" without also mentioning "Apple") shows a massive day-long total of 752,346 tweets.
• So, big picture: Though on an hour-by -hour basis (as shown in our chart), Weiner came close to outdoing just Apple (and #apple) in tweet volume (and actually outdid iCloud/#iCloud), overall Steve Jobs & Co. handily beat the frisky congressman in Twitter buzz by the end of the day.

By the way, though we tend to focus on Twitter buzz in these weekly charticles, Trendrr tracks data from all sorts of different sources -- including eBay. So I'm indebted to the folks at Trendrr for calling my attention to a current auction titled "Anthony Weiner Replica Underwear New Twitter Weinergate," whose listing includes an unremarkable product shot of a pair of (thankfully unworn) gray underwear and this description:

Up for sale is a replica pair of boxer briefs underwear just like the ones worn by United States Representative Anthony Weiner. You may not be able to be Rep. Weiner, but you can wear the same color underwear and send pictures of yourself in them to friends around the world via Twitter. These are new and have never been worn by Anthony Weiner or any weiner. These boxer briefs will not make you a little man with a big temper just like Anthony, but do look great in photos. With these boxer briefs everytime is "Weinertime".

Bidding starts at 99 cents (plus $5.95 for shipping) -- or you can "Buy It Now" for just $499.99.

Dumenco's Trendrr Chart of the Week is produced in collaboration with Wiredset, the New York digital agency behind Trendrr.

Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.