It’s been amazing sitting next to Matt at the day job and having a front row seat for the massive and sudden popularity of his hurricane tracking site Stormpulse.com. He looked like Squidley Diddley last week, arms flying around, furiously juggling two phones, e-mail, instant messages, text messages and even one whacko lawsuit threat, all hurricane-related. (Does anyone else remember Squidley Diddley, the octopus cartoon character from Hanna-Barbera, or am I making that up?) Then there’s his full-time job at The Post, not to mention two young kids at home. Maybe he’s just conducting an elaborate sleep-deprivation experiment.

Since the embeddable Stormpulse map debuted on PalmBeachPost.com seven weeks ago, it’s spread to dozens of media and weather sites across the country. Then hurricane season heated up to 2004 and 2005 levels in the past two weeks, and everything just sort of blew up. New features, exponential traffic growth, and  they even made TechCrunch on Friday. Congratulations to Matt and his partner Brad for the recent, stunning and well-deserved success of Stormpulse. It’s a powerful lesson, one from which newspapers could learn, in the power of identifying and solving, meticulously and obsessively, a real world problem or need.

In case you missed it amid last week’s hurricane excitement, Stormpulse now has a product page on Facebook, so go there and become a fan. They also added Tipjoy, a virtual tip jar, to the site, which allows you to easily leave micropayments (or big, fat macropayments if you’re feeling generous) as gratitude for the awesome resource they’ve built. I like to leave 10 cents for every forecast that doesn’t show a killer storm smashing into my house. Looks like the Tipjoy thing is gone now that everyone asking how they could support the site had the chance to pledge some change. Now I just hope they remember to actually make the payments on those pledges.