The first big Harry Potter spike we see on February first is for the announcement of the release date of Book 7: The Deathly Hallows. The HP blip on March 28th indicates the chatter that followed the release of the Book 7 Cover. This is about the same impact the release of the Pirate trailer had the week previous. The blip on May 31st during the Pirates craze shows the impact of the announcement of the Harry Potter themed amusement park. Of course the hockey stick at the end of the graph is the hype machine for the latest film, "The Order of the Phoenix." To contrast this I also graphed the impact of the June release of the new Fantastic Four movie, "The Rise of the Silver Surfer." Ouch.
This shows that the Book related announcements garner almost as much attention as the release of a large summer movie. However the Harry Potter movie experience dwarfs the impact of other summer film releases. Of course this analysis is a completely qualitative investigation, so if you dislike Harry Potter, you are free to dismiss its cultural impact. Or worse, one may manipulate these trends to show the shocking dominance of film media over book media, and popular books like Harry Potter over serious literature. Not that I'm cynical.
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