WASHINGTON - POP star Michael Jackson's death is being seen as a digital watershed event with a website, TMZ.com, scooping the rest of the world's media and millions around the world finding out about it online.
Seminal moment in Internet history
TMZ, whose most notable previous scoops included Mel Gibson's 2006 arrest for drunk driving and the breakup of Britney Spears' marriage, kicked off its coverage with a brief report on Thursday afternoon.
'We've just learned Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Los Angeles... and we're told it was cardiac arrest and that paramedics administered CPR in the ambulance... and it's looking bad,' it said.
TMZ, a joint venture of Time Warner's Internet portal AOL and Telepictures Productions, left more established media outlets in its wake, publishing the first reports on both Jackson's hospitalisation and on his death.
News of the sudden demise of the 'King of Pop' rocketed around the Web at cyberspeed based solely on the TMZ reports, spread by posts on micro-blogging service Twitter, Facebook status updates, instant messages and emails.
'Increasingly, people are turning to Twitter and social media, Facebook in a big way, to just talk and share ideas and feel that they're connected to other people in moments of joy and crisis,' said Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and new media professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Other media outlets eventually confirmed the TMZ reports and Web surfers around the globe turned to their favorite websites for news or to YouTube to watch Michael Jackson videos or post their own tributes.
Yahoo! said the news area on its front page received five times its normal traffic and its front page story 'Michael Jackson rushed to hospital' was its 'highest clicking story' ever with 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes.
'Yahoo! News set an all-time record in unique visitors with 16.4 million people, surpassing our previous record of 15.1 million visitors on election day,' it said. 'Michael Jackson's death was clearly a seminal event.' The heavy traffic reportedly strained the servers of a number of websites, including those of Twitter, but they mostly held up under the heavy load.
Respected technology blogger Om Malik said reports of an Internet meltdown seemed a 'tad sensationalist.' 'Only a handful of sites went on the blink,' he wrote in a post on his blog GigaOm.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted a message on his Twitter feed late on Thursday after getting off a plane. 'Stepped off a 10hr flight to discover Twitter is essentially a wake for recently departed Michael Jackson,' he said.
Three of the top five 'trending topics' on Twitter were Jackson-related, pushing Fawcett down to number three and the Iranian election down to number five.
The Nielsen Co said on Friday that 16 per cent of Twitter messages over the past 24 hours referenced Jackson. Less than two per cent of 'tweets' mentioned Fawcett and Iran. -- AFP
