Michael Jackson and the Internet

The most interesting thing that Michael Jackson took with him on his journey to the other side ... was the Internet.

I'll probably never forget where I was when the King of Pop passed away. I was sitting in a lecture on Inventory Management at SJSU when my iPhone started buzzing. Looking down, I noticed a CNN News Alert which, to my surprise, stated that Michael Jackson had gone into cardiac arrest. Quickly, I went to the accompanying mobile link to read the background on what was going on. It was true, Jackson had suffered cardiac arrest but nothing regarding his passing had yet posted. So, like any techno-savvy affectionado I did what was required of me ... I tweeted this news up to Twitter to share amongst those who may have not heard yet. This however, was just the beginning.

Around 3:00pm, a colleague turned to me and said "Did you hear that Michael Jackson died?" No way! I turned to my iPhone and what I experienced was the last real power that was Michael Jackson.

I quickly hit some major news outlets mobile site's, Google News, CNN, MSNBC. Each site began loading but after about 30 seconds, my request timed out and stopped. Google News actually behaved a little different. The site displayed a "We're Sorry" page, believing that I was sending malicious requests to it. I moved onto other sources. Drudge Report was the first sighting where I could actually confirm that the world did believe that MJ was gone. The front page read "The King is Dead" in big red fonts. However, after following their story, I found myself on the front page of TMZ stating "Michael Jackson Dies." Amazingly, I had found myself looking at the first reports of MJ's death from a celebrity gossip column. A short time after, the major news outlets began confirming and reporting the news and the Internet itself seemed to recover.

As I looked back over the event, the biggest thought I had besides MJ's death was "How could one man's death bring down the enter Internet?" In the days after, I read a few interesting comments about the event. On the radio, I heard that after his death, MJ's sales on Amazon.com went up a staggering 700% from it's normal sales. His music sales soared on iTunes and Amazon to gain the top positions. It was almost eery to see that his untimely death was the most powerful promotional tool he had since the 80's.

On Google's official blog, they reported that searches for Michael Jackson had "skyrocketed" on the news to "Volcanic" levels as labeled by their Google Trends service. The trends service had already had piqued interest of Farrah Fawcett, Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum's death (Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum was a hoax that was quickly snuffed).

The Internet site Slashdot.org reported that many sites including Twitter, CNN, MSNBC, AOL and Yahoo could not keep up with the traffic and the geographic monitoring tool, Keynote, reported major latencies. What's most impressive however was how Google itself thought that the raw searches of Michael Jackson from various points was a mass attack on it's systems and attempted to protect itself, while every other service was inundated and crashed. It appeared that news of his death had people scrambling to verify authenticity of the reports as it had seemed just so unreal. The Internet had quite frankly met it's match, and the King of Pop had been declared the winner. Amazing.

No one can argue Michael Jackson's legendary pop icon status and global appeal. I can still remember studying his dance moves (take a look at the video at the end) to take out to the dance floors when I was in high school and in similar ways, we all have our MJ connections that will allow us to remember him. The way news of MJ went across the Internet was revolutionary and showed that one single event can cause a demand that even the most powerful Internet services could not handle. It was quite spectacular to experience MJ's influence just one more time, even it was just on my phone. In the end, "The Thriller" delivered one last time.