Technical stuff Requirements are like water. They're easier to build on when they're frozen.

So, we need to find out different values of a column and the number of their occurrences. Let’s set up a small test first:

-- Step #1: prepare the ground
CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `test`;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `test`.`test_count_distinct`;

CREATE TABLE `test`.`test_count_distinct` (
  `id` INT(11) NOT NULL auto_increment
      PRIMARY KEY,
  `title` VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `date_created` TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
  `date_updated` TIMESTAMP NOT NULL
      DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
      ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
);

-- using NULL insert for a timestamp column is
--    just like using NOW()
-- @link http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/timestamp.html
INSERT INTO `test`.`test_count_distinct` ( `title`, `date_created` )
VALUES
  ( 'value',   NULL )
, ( 'value 1', NULL )
, ( 'value 2', NULL )
, ( 'value',   NULL )
, ( 'value 1', NULL )
, ( 'value 2', NULL )
, ( 'value',   NULL )
, ( 'value 3', NULL )
;

Now let’s find out how many different values are there in the `title` column, and how many times each value occurs:

-- Step #2: do work
--          here is where we find out
--          different values of `title` and
--          the number of their occurrences
SELECT
        DISTINCT `t`.`title` AS `title`,
        COUNT( `t`.`title`) AS `cnt`
    FROM `test`.`test_count_distinct` t
    GROUP BY `title`
    ORDER BY `cnt` DESC
;

And the result will look like:

+---------+-----+
| title   | cnt |
+---------+-----+
| value   |   3 |
| value 2 |   2 |
| value 1 |   2 |
| value 3 |   1 |
+---------+-----+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

You can get the code here.