OrangeCountyConcepts.com

As the news broke today about Michael Jackson’s death many websites reporting the news were effected by the massive amount of hits they were receiving. The news topped updates on Twitter and caused huge spikes of visits to Facebook and other Web sites. My own twitter, and facebook homepages were a sea of Jackson comments, as I posted earlier. At one point I had two full pages of status updates related to Michael Jackson. Facebook’s people said that user “status updates” on typically a quick, short comment to a user’s personal network of friends and acquaintances, were running at three times the usual pace in the hour after the news broke. Such updates “are still well above our usual numbers,” after 5 p.m.

On the “google trends” website (http://www.google.com/trends), Michael Jackson related searches including “michael jackson died”, “michael jackson dead 2009″, “michael jackson heart attack”, and others were six of the top ten search requests. Two other noteworthy searches were “harrsion ford dead” and “jeff goldblum dead”, both rumors started through twitter status updates.

Micheal Jackson’s death broke Google for a time today. So many people around the world were typing the words “Michael Jackson” into the search engine simultaneously that Google News’ computer filters assumed someone was spamming the system. Instead of news about the King of Pop’s death, many frustrated users got an error message. “We’re sorry … but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application,” the error message read. Google officials said the problem was fixed within 35 minutes.

According to TMZ.com, who broke the news of his death first, The internet hasn’t seen this kind of traffic “since Obama’s inauguration”. Throughout my own internet surfing today I have been unable to connect to, LATimes.com, TMZ.com, Twitter.com, PerezHilton.com, and most interestingly Theo2.co.uk. Theo2.co.uk is the website for O2, the arena in London where Jackson was scheduled to perform 50 sold out shows at starting next month.

And of course, our own orangecountyconcepts.com… I blogged about this story minutes after the first TMZ report making our site one of the first blogs to feature the story. According to TMZ.com, who broke the news of his death first, The internet hasn’t seen this kind of traffic since Obama’s inauguration.

Is there any other celebrity in the world who’s death could make such a huge cultural impact? Obviously it would be tasteless to mention who else could bring the web to a hault, but I believe that there are very few others, and would put Michael Jackson in the top 3 of this list. Every news station has abandoned regular programing and is now reporting in non-stop blocks about the King of Pop’s death. As I personally reflect, from the view of a DJ, and someone who has been in the music industry for years now, its hard to imagine DJing one night, at a club, bar, or even a wedding or bar mitzvah without Michael Jackson…. His music was timeless and bridged the generational gap. 750 million albums sold, that will NEVER happen again.

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