Consumer discussion on blogs took off after Phelps’ gold medal win in the 400m Individual Medley on August 10th (.31%), grew when he contributed to the U.S. teams win in the 4x100 freestyle relay and continued to climb after he snatched the gold medals on August 12th and August 13th (.50%) in the 200m Freestyle and 200m Butterfly, respectively. Phelps continued to make history after his unblemished performance in the 200m Individual Medley last night, earning his sixth gold medal. Conversations spiked again today for the flawless Phelps with .45% buzz volume. As Phelps continues his journey for a record eight golds, I anticipate more significant spikes in consumer discussion online. We’ll all be watching this weekend!

The deadline for submissions is August 18th, so enter your campaigns here. We’ll award prizes across seventeen categories, ranging from viral marketing, radio and print to wireless promotion, public relations and social media. The Grand Prize winner snags a spread 4/c ad in AdWeek, BrandWeek and MediaWeek profiling the winning effort (valued at $64,100). Enter the 2008 Buzz Awards today.

As reflected in the blogpulse chart below, post-premiere buzz for “The Dark Knight” was triple that of 2008’s other comic-book movie “Iron Man” and adventure flick “Indiana Jones”, accounting for 1.3% of total consumer discussion on July 18th, the day the film premiered. “The Dark Knight” has set a buzz standard for the movie industry to live up to for years to come.

Now that the race to the White House is officially underway, Nielsen Online will closely monitor and analyze how the candidates leverage online platforms to communicate and to attract voters. Over the next several months, we will provide trends and insights surrounding brand (candidate sites), social media, video and advertising. For an initial analysis around this year’s presidential candidates, check out our recent press release.

Last week the NBA draft ,took center court on Blogosphere commanding a 0.3% share of overall buzz. Which was slightly more than the always-popular term “gas prices.” On a week when oil was hitting record high’s folks were still finding time to speculate about their favorite team’s draft picks.

Last night, the Boston Celtics routed the LA Lakers to win the NBA title. Naturally, I wanted to see its buzz in relations to the other professional sports leagues. As you can expect, most teams garner quite a bit of conversation on a regular basis but as the NBA Finals kickoff we see an escalation of chatter about the two teams.

You can see this and more trends here.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone with 3G capabilities and the blogosphere responded with big thumbs up! Blogpulse is sprinkled with references to it from the iPhone Ads in the top videos to the listings in the Top Blog Posts. Below is a chart showing the tremendous buzz the Apple announcement generated.

Horse-racing fans are eagerly anticipating the Belmont Stakes as Big Brown will compete for the Triple Crown on June 7th at Belmont. After breezing through the Kentucky Derby in May and the Preakness later that month, Big Brown caused an uptick in online conversations around the Triple Crown.

The first spike in consumer discussion took place on May 3rd, as Big Brown captured the Kentucky Derby crown. Conversation drivers included the remembrance of second runner-up Eight Belles, who collapsed after the race and was immediately euthanized, Big Brown’s big win, and references to Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who shattered his leg in the 2006 Preakness, and then put to rest. Online discussions for the Triple Crown peaked again on May 17th as Big Brown won the Preakness, up 18.5% since May 3rd, while conversations increased 64% for Big Brown.

Online discussions for the Triple Crown peaked again on May 17th as Big Brown won the Preakness Stakes; it was up 18.5% since May 3rd, while conversations increased 64% for Big Brown. Discussions were primarily based around whether Big Brown would be able to capture the Triple Crown or if he would fall short like Smarty Jones.

Here is the query.

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).

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.

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.