Around BlogPulse Today - Scott McClellan's book and The Evolution of Dance

BlogPulse’s top charts today have an interesting mix of new and old videos and news stories, including the “Evolution of Dance” and “Diet Coke and Mentos.” Former White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellan’s book announcement, accounts for six of the top 15 stories including this one by the New York Times and this one by the Washington Post. He is also at the top of the charts on the Key People and Top Videos listings. In fact, his buzz is so high its higher than President Bush’s conversation this week.

Other interesting stories on BlogPulse include the Google Android demo (here), the biggest drawing in the world (here) and the Dell’s Mini Inspiron laptop (here).

Summer Movie Buzz...Is it Predictable?

Is it possible to predict how much buzz a movie opening will get based on the buzz three days before it opens? Using BlogPulse, Nielsen Online’s free tool that mines data from over 78 million blogs, I queried two recent movie premieres (Iron Man and Speed Racer) and one about to open today (Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull).

The results are interesting, showing that buzz levels for each movie seem to be equal as they spike and decline in the days before and after the opening. Does this pattern hold true for all premieres? Three days before the premieres of Iron Man and Speed Racer their buzz levels began to spike and eventually tripled on opening day. Iron Man went from 0.182 to 0.486 percent of all blog posts and Speed Racer went from 0.055 to 0.195 percent of all messages measured by BlogPulse.

The buzz level for Indiana Jones three days before was 0.273 percent of all messages. If the theory holds true on opening day, we will see the spike for Indy triple to somewhere in the 0.8 percent range... well beyond Iron Man which has been the biggest blockbuster this year. We’ll check back next week to compare the buzz and the box office for Dr. Jones.

A few highlights for 2007

After a short break, (its been a year but who is counting) we are back to highlight some of BlogPulse’s favorite stories, videos and people from last year. If you are a new or a returning visitor to BlogPulse, it is a great free tool offered by Nielsen Online for exploring social media trends. And without further delay, here are some brief trends from last year that we missed.

As the calendar turned to 2007, much of the online news was focused on the trends for the New Year, Iraq and French protests. That soon ended and turned to one of the year’s biggest stories for BlogPulse, as all eyes were on the iPhone and Steven Jobs announcement of it at MacWorld in late January. On January 31 this video was uploaded to YouTube and 5 days later it began a long stint in BlogPulse’s Top Videos category.

Twitter emerged last year with several news stories, blogs and videos (here, here, here and here) chronicling its rise to Web 2.0 fame. There was also plenty of branded content (here (Toyota World of Warcraft) and here (Sony Bravia) on BlogPulse’s charts including the famous Dove Onslaught video.

A major theme of 2007 was politics, which were heavily represented throughout the year, from the famous "I Got a Crush...On Obama" By Obama Girl to Mike Huckabee – Chuck Norris video. Other big news stories included the Benazir Bhutto Assasination, Virginia Tech shootings and Writer’s Strike in Hollywood.

2007 was a great year for BlogPulse and we look forward to keeping you informed about all the great site improvements, happenings and stories in 2008 and beyond. Come back often to see what’s new with BlogPulse and across the blogosphere.