Remember not so long ago when we were very excited about crossing the 5 million mark? Well, in the last couple of weeks, we suddenly raced past 6, 7, and 8 million topics in Freebase, to reach a current total of 8,450,348 topics.

This is largely thanks to two big loads from the data team: first up, a massive import of millions of books and related information from the Open Library Project, and secondly a big load of around 255k TV episodes from TVRage.

Here’s a chart showing topic growth in Freebase since the beginning of April:

Topic growth in Freebase, April to August 2009

To take a look at the relevant data, visit our Publishing Commons or TV Commons. For some apps taking advantage of all this data, look at Tippify for book recommendations, or Alex’s TV4Me app (currently in development), a mashup of Freebase’s TV data with US broadcast schedules.