After the effect the internet has had on the Iranian movement we have another fact proving the power of the internet and social networking.

Even when the first reports came out on mainstream news sites such as Sky News that Jackson may have died they were only sourcing this from the gossip website TMZ which had reported the death a whole hour before anyone else.

GoogleNews said on Thursday its search engine received so many search queries about Michael Jackson’s death that as a result users saw a “we are sorry” page before being shown the actual article. This was In fact due to Google mistaking the surge in searches for an automated attack. To give you a sense of the traffic just have a look at the graph below.

It was also reported by the twitter tracking tool Twist that around the time of Michael Jackson’s death 22.61% of tweets contained the word ‘Michael Jackson’. Pete Cashmore from Mashable also reported that ‘MJ’ accounted for 9% of tweets, ‘Michael’ for 25%, which in total meant around 30% of tweets were about Jackson’s death (but even this was likely to be an underestimate).

The traffic was so huge that twitter even crashed leading illustrator Raul Orozco to create the dedication image at the top of this post, which is based on the fail whale image that appears when twitter is down.

It’s amazing how in only a few minutes, people found out about Jackson’s death through social networking sites instead of official news channels and websites. All that is left to say is RIP Michael Jackson, you will be missed.