Susan’s second album, The Gift, sold 272,000 copies last week in the US.

Meanwhile, in the UK album chart, Susan’s album is at number 5 with Take That’s Progress retaining the number one position.

The upsurge in sales is as a result of Susan’s chat and performance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, although her segment was only 20 minutes long. Adam Lambert’s segment took up the balance of the hour long broadcast.

I am still expecting Susan Boyle to appear on Oprah at some time in the future. Some reports suggest that the interview will be taped tomorrow, and aired at a later date. According to the Chicago Tribune, Adam Lambert will appear on the same episode of Oprah as Susan Boyle.

Adam has apparently tweeted: “Happy as a clam. Off to Chicago tomorrow morning to film Oprah.”

Back to Ke$ha, the spelling of her name is giving me wicked ideas. Should Mr Cowell perhaps change his name to $imon?

According to Billboard, the total number of sales of Taylor Swift’s Fearless are 3,157,000, whereas the total number of sales of I Dreamed a Dream stand at 2,982,000.

“Fearless” is projected to sell a further 65,000 to 75,000 copies this week, and current predictions are that I Dreamed a Dream will not sell sufficient copies to close the gap, although the album is projected to sell over 100,000 copies this week.

The figures come from Nielsen SoundScan.

Next week’s album chart will be published on Wednesday, 6th January and includes data for the week ending Sunday, 3rd January.

Andrea Bocelli, with whom Susan Boyle has been tipped to duet in 2010, held onto his number 3 position with his album My Christmas.

According to the article, Susan’s album sales “almost equal” those of Taylor Swift’s Fearless, so we’ll just have to wait until Sunday to see if Susan’s album sales overtake those of Taylor.

Susan waved happily to fans, although she declined a request by one of the TV networks to give an impromptu rendition of one of her songs.

According to Tokyo newspaper Nikkan Gendai, Susan will receive 5 million yen for the appearance and a further 5 million yen for her entourage and travel expenses.

It is thought that Susan will sing a Japanese folk song and also perform Wings to Fly, a bonus track that appeared only on the Japanese version of her “I Dreamed a Dream” album.

In other news, Susan looks likely to hold onto her number one spot on the Billboard 200 for a further week, preventing Mary J Blige from achieving the number one spot. Last week, she held off Alicia Keys from the number one position.? Industry sources are predicting that “I Dreamed a Dream” could sell another 500,000 copies by Sunday night, and Susan is currently being tipped to take over from Taylor Swift to have the best selling US album of the year, although the final figures will not be known until Sunday.

Nevertheless, in the US, there are still two full sales weeks left and the highest selling album will not be known until January 3rd, 2010. With Susan Boyle is currently selling about three times as many copies of her album as Taylor Swift, will her sales surpass Taylor’s next week or the week after? I predict that they will.

In the meantime, I Dreamed A Dream is officially the second biggest selling album of the year in America, overtaking Eminem’s Relapse, according to Undercover.com.au.

In other news, it has been confirmed that the video of Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent audition was the top video of the year, with YouTube owners Google saying the video was watched more than 120 million times.

Susan’s TV special: I Dreamed a Dream – The Susan Boyle Story was also a big hit, becoming the number one rated television special in the history of TV Guide Network. The Americans were particularly excited about Elaine Paige’s duet with Susan Boyle. Misti in Seattle tells me: “Everyone here is SO excited and thrilled about Susan’s duet with Elaine and wanting more! In fact we are very happy for Elaine as most of us had not even heard of her before and now SHE is also going to have a wonderful career here in the USA as well as her British one.

Misti continues: “She was so sweet to Susan at the beginning when others were making fun of her and she has been so gracious about being the “guest” and giving Susan her “star” time. They both just sparkle together and sound wonderful.

“I am so hoping they do an album together and bet they will as the producers will not let THIS money maker slide through their hands.”

I think we’d all like to see more collaboration between Elaine Paige and Susan Boyle, wouldn’t we? An album of duets would be lovely.

For those of you who don’t know Elaine Paige, she has had a long career in musical theatre in the West End, but became better known by the public when Andrew Lloyd Webber selected her to play Eva Peron in his new musical Evita, back in 1978. It was Elaine Paige who recorded the original “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” and the other songs from the musical, long before Madonna remade them.

And finally, Susan Boyle is unsurprisingly odds on to secure the Christmas number one album spot in the UK, according to the bookmakers Ladbrokes.

Even though this figure was 25% lower than the first week’s slaes, which were 701,000, Susan easily remained in the top spot, the closest competition coming from Andrea Bocelli’s My Christmas, which sold 428,000 copies.

In other news, Susan Boyle has referred to David Hasselhoff as? “a nice wee hunk”? – she met The Hoff when she appeared on America’s Got Talent.

Mr Hasselhoff, meanwhile, has repaid the compliment to Susan,? praising her for “bringing the world together”.

The sales for Susan’s album are the best seen since October 2008, when AC/DC sold 784,000 copies of “Black Ice” in a single week, according to Billboard.

The week of sales started Monday November 23rd when the album was released and finished at the close of sales on Sunday November 29th.

Another record for Susan – the sales of “I Dreamed a Dream” are the best ever for a female artist’s debut album since SoundScan started to track sales in 1991.

In other news, Susan Boyle gets the Pole Position on the Google Zeitgeist list, according to ITProPortal. The search term “Susan Boyle” was at the top of? the list of Google?s fastest rising news searches for 2009, along with, wait for it… “swine flu”.

Finally, a group Christmas Card has been set up for Susan Boyle on Groupcard.com. Click here if you want to add your name.