At its height yesterday, 15% of all Twitter posts were about Michael Jackson according to Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Iran and swine flu never reached over 5%.
the social networking site Twitter came to a virtual standstill, flooded with visitors tweeting the news. Within moments of the first breaking news reports — indicating that Jackson had suffered cardiac arrest and had been rushed via ambulance to a Los Angeles hospital — both “#michaeljackson” and “Cardiac Arrest” emerged as two of the network’s highest-rated “trending topics.”
I couldn’t help but notice that news of Mr. Jackson’s death, which graced the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post, along with dominating the headlines on The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, TIME and The New Republic, didn’t make the front page of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times noticed, too. Commercial turtle harvesting did, however.