Digital Media

The death of Michael Jackson in June launched a frenzy of Web activity and propelled the late pop star to the top of the search charts for 2009.

That's the word from Google, Yahoo, and Bing, all of which have revealed their popular search terms for the past year.

It's not too shocking to see Jackson leading the searches for the year. Following the pop star's death in June, Akamai found that worldwide Web traffic had surged 11 percent over normal levels. Even Google--which in the initial going thought the Jackson-related traffic was an attack of some sort--was briefly sent staggering.

According to Google's Zeitgeist findings, "Michael Jackson" was the "fastest rising" worldwide search term of 2009. In the U.S., "Michael Jackson" placed second behind "Twitter." Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, in a blog post also pointed to an up-and-coming music sensation:

As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe. And a new star was born, too--quirky pop singer Lady Gaga became a search sensation the world over. In addition to appearing on many regional fastest-rising search term lists, from the Czech Republic to Switzerland and Kenya to the United Kingdom, Lady Gaga also landed in the #9 spot on the global fastest rising list.

On the social side, Google monitored whose Twitter accounts were the most searched for. According to the company, Miley Cyrus' Twitter account was the most sought after, followed by those of Lance Armstrong and Taylor Swift. Khloe Kardashian's marriage to basketball player Lamar Odom was the most-Googled wedding of the year.

"Michael Jackson" was the top Yahoo search term for the year. He was followed by a who's who (and a what's what) of the U.S. entertainment scene. "Twilight" was the second most-popular search term, followed by wrestling organization "WWE," starlet "Megan Fox," singer "Britney Spears," and manga series "Naruto." Filling out the top 10 were "American Idol," "Kim Kardashian," "Nascar," and "Runescape."

Microsoft's Bing, which debuted in late May, had similar results. Once again, "Michael Jackson" was the top "trending topic," followed by "Twitter" and "swine flu." "Stock market" and "Farrah Fawcett" rounded out Bing's top five.

Of course, 2009 was also marked by continued concern over the state of the economy. According to Yahoo, "coupons," "unemployment," and "stimulus plan" were the most-numerous queries related to the economy. By contrast, Google's most-searched economy-related terms were "crisis," "cash for clunkers," and "Iceland."

Google also followed queries related to celebrity deaths in 2009. Users searched for "Michael Jackson" the most, followed by "Billy Mays" and "Steve McNair." Yahoo's data revealed that Michael Jackson's death was the most-searched term, but unlike Google's data, the pop star was followed by "Farrah Fawcett" and "Patrick Swayze."

See also:
• Google Zeitgeist 2009
• Yahoo Year in Review 2009
• Top Bing searches in 2009

Perhaps you were one of those who voted for your favorite corpse to be one who will participate in the Tweance.

The Tweance? Yes, the Halloween seance to be performed upon the heavenly medium that is Twitter.

Famous and entirely reliable psychic Jayne Wallace is to tweet her way to and through heaven and hell this Friday, between the hours of 10 a.m. and midday British Thoroughly Awful Time (3 a.m. to 5 a.m. Pacific)

We, the grieving earthly leftbehinds, were asked by the organizers--some folks called Angels Fancy Dress--to vote for our most cherished and lost stars. However, time permitted that only four would be awoken from their eternal slumber by a tweet.

I can now reveal the entirely stunning news that Michael Jackson will be among the four and will unquestionably be answering the query that is on everyone's mind: are there fine doctors in heaven?

Joining him in this immortal twittering spectacle will be, yes, truly, Kurt Cobain. And nuzzling up closely with his celestial cell phone will be River Phoenix.

The fourth member of this dead artists' supergroup might feel he has little in common with the other three.

He didn't seem to die of an overdose of one kind of drug or another. In fact, the worst thing he has ever been accused of was a spot of plagiarism and allowing himself to be portrayed in a movie by Joseph Fiennes.

Yes, you can go to twitter.com/Tweance at the appointed time and listen to William Shakespeare himself.

Does he feel love's labor has, indeed, been lost? Is his favorite movie "Hamlet" or "Macbeth?" And does he really have a thing for Gwyneth Paltrow?

I am deeply disappointed that Jeffrey Dahmer, Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth Lay, Anna-Nicole Smith, Chief Inspector Morse, Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopez, and Golda Meir failed to make the cut.

However, I feel sure that the presence of William Shakespeare will elevate the Tweance to the status of a permanent event in the world's spiritual calendar.

Weeks ago, the news of Michael Jackson's passing brought major news sites to their knees, so Tuesday's memorial service for the singer was expected to bring similar results.

This time it appears sites were better prepared for the traffic onslaught.

According to Gomez Incorporated, a company that monitors Web usage quality, there were both slowdowns and outages, including one that dramatically slowed Twitter's performance. The company analyzed performance on seven news sites from multiple locations during Tuesday's event, with some of the biggest slowdowns coming to streaming video. Asia experienced a 40 percent increase in what the company calls "stalling issues," with the U.S. experiencing an increase of around 5 percent.

One of those news outlets that was serving up live streaming video was CNN, which according to internal data, topped out at 781,000 concurrent streams of the event. Between midnight EDT and 4 p.m. the site also pulled in 11 million unique users who turned 72 million pages.

Ustream, which provided live streaming in a partnership with CBS, says the event was the "largest ever" that had been hosted on the service, in part because it was a worldwide broadcast. The service had 4.6 million streams of the memorial going, made up from 1.6 million unique users. It also had more than 12,000 messages posted every minute to its built-in user chat rooms. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Besides slowdowns in streaming video, news sites also had lower availability, which means some users were unable to access them. Gomez recorded that number as low as 98.2 percent, whereas the sites usually maintain uptime in excess of 99.65 percent. Response times also took a hit. News sites experienced double, and nearly triple the load time to serve up pages. In the case of Twitter, many users were unable to view or post messages to the service. At what was seemingly the peak of Twitter's load, Gomez benchmarked it as taking around 62 seconds for the site's home page to load, then allow users to log in--a process that normally takes just a few seconds.

Update: See also Larry Dignan's analysis over at ZDNet. He points to data host Akamai's visualization tool, which shows real-time activity on its sites which represent around 20 percent of the Web's traffic. There's a noticeable bump around the time the memorial service begins.

CNET News' Greg Sandoval contributed to this report.

Some 1.6 million people registered for a chance to receive 8,750 pairs of tickets to attend Michael Jackson's memorial service at the Staples Center on Tuesday. But if you weren't among the lucky few who won tickets but feel the need to bear witness to the spectacle, fear not--several Web sites plan to provide live streaming video of the event.

The service will be a star-studded event, with singers Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey, Lionel Richie, and Smokey Robinson expected to perform in what some expect to be the biggest event in the Web's history.

Considering how news Web sites buckled under the weight of the public's thirst for news on the singer's death last month, how the Web will handle the public's demand for a live view of the service is the big mystery. Indeed, the surge of Michael Jackson-related searches on Google News was first interpreted by the search giant as an attack on its service.

Here's a sampling of the Web sites that plan to offer live streams from the service, which begins at 10 a.m. PDT:

News sites
CBSNews.com, which is owned by CNET parent CBS, plans to stream video provided by Los Angeles-based station KCBS, as well as other sources. TV.com, also a CBS property, plans to stream the CBSNews.com content as well.

CNN plans to stream the memorial service with hosts Anderson Cooper, Larry King, Don Lemon, and Soledad O'Brien.

ABCNews.com plans to stream live with commentary from Charles Gibson.

Fox News' live stream will be hosted by Shepard Smith, with Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly providing live reports from the scene.

Local Fox affiliate KTTV is also providing live streaming.

U.K. news site SkyNews is providing live HD streaming.

Video and social networking
Hulu, as one of the most popular video Web sites, may be one of the best-prepared sites to handle the load. It plans to stream the Fox News feed.

Microsoft's InMusic is providing high-definition streaming via its Silverlight and SmoothStreaming technology.

MySpace members will have access to a live stream provided by entertainment titan AEG, which owns the Staples Center and was underwriting the planned Jackson tour.

Facebook members will have access to CNN Live feed thanks to a partnership with the TV news channel.

Updated at 10 a.m. with more news sites.

This story has been updated. See below for details.

Keynote Systems, a company that measures Web site performance, created some confusion on Friday by acknowledging that it released easily misunderstood data on how Web news services fared following the death of Michael Jackson.

Keynote follows a multitude of Web sites and monitors their performance with the help of 3,000 servers in 59 countries. On Thursday, the company said the online units of major news services became nearly inaccessible for long periods of time, as people rushed online to learn about Jackson's condition.

However, site accessibility wasn't necessarily as bad as Keynote initially reported. There is no question that many media sites were under a strain starting at about 2:40 p.m. PDT, but to what extent and exactly which Web sites suffered the most is hard to determine, Keynote said.

Keynote initially said ABCNews.com was nearly impossible to log on to for nearly two hours. Dan Berkowitz, a Keynote spokesman, said Friday that in truth the site delivered pages to visitors at close to normal speed during the hour-long traffic spike following Jackson's death. A representative for Disney, which owns ABC, said the company saw "no dips in performance" as a result of the traffic glut.

"We apologize for this," Berkowitz said. "This has never happened before and it won't ever happen again."

The reason for the confusion, according to Berkowitz, had to do with the way Keynote follows the serving of ads. Apparently, some third-party ad vendors had trouble loading ads to the millions of pages being delivered. Depending on how the Web pages on news sites are constructed, this could have contributed to a slowdown, Berkowitz said.

In other cases, news stories would have loaded just fine, he said.

In Google's situation, the search engine acknowledged that some users couldn't access Google News for about 20 minutes after reports began circulating that Jackson had collapsed. It turns out Google's systems misinterpreted the traffic spike as an attack.

Update, June 29 at 11:15 a.m. PDT: Changes reflect additional information about Keynote's data collection methods.

It happens time and time again: when news breaks, the Internet slows.

It's quite obvious at this point that the Internet has muscled its way into the lives of anyone who needs information. And Michael Jackson's death Thursday had as great an impact on the Internet as anything in the history of the medium that didn't involve the World Trade Center.

The statistics are amazing: Akamai said worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson's death was breaking. That traffic forced even Google to its knees for a brief period of time Thursday afternoon.

Can a system that has trouble keeping up with ever-increasing demand for its services be considered a reliable source of information when a true crisis emerges? After an editor banished a budding argument between CNET News' Tom Krazit and Declan McCullagh from a company-wide mailing list, we decided to let them fight it out here.

Tom: How can any system that doesn't work precisely when people need it the most be considered the future of communications?

In a way, it took the death of perhaps the greatest entertainer of the last century to expose a key truth of this century: our new favorite communications tool, the Internet, buckles in times of crisis. News sites, including this one, were sluggish or completely offline at the peak of demand for information, forcing many to go back in time and flip on the television.

What if something really happens? How can companies trying to build information-related businesses on the Internet ever hope to supplant existing communications networks if they fail at the moment of truth? CNN's telecast didn't go down Thursday.

Declan: I think it's a little unfair to say the Internet "buckles in times of crisis." Sure, a few Web sites--Google News, The Los Angeles Times, TMZ, Yahoo, MSNBC--had slowdowns or outages. (That list includes our own CNET and CBS Interactive sites, which experienced serious problems for about half an hour.)

Some news Web sites slowing down or becoming unreachable for 30 minutes is not the same thing as the Internet "buckling." If an earthquake were to take out the trans-Pacific cable landings in California's Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, and Grover Beach, if car bombs knocked out MAE East and MAE West, and if a hurricane laid low the cable landings in Long Island and New Jersey, that might--might!--qualify.

In fact, yesterday's sad news about Michael Jackson demonstrated not the vulnerability, but the resilience of the modern Internet ecosystem. True, a few sites were having problems. But The Los Angeles Times' report about Jackson's coma, and its subsequent report about his death, were picked up and mirrored widely. Even if you couldn't get through to the Times, you could get through to innumerable blogs and others news sites citing it. Or you could just wait a few minutes for the traffic to die down.

Was this really such an inconvenience?

Tom: Ok, I'll concede the point about the broader Internet: near as I could tell, ICanHazCheeseburger.com was performing like a champ yesterday.

But this is a systemic problem with the Internet, or perhaps put more accurately, the Web. The more people who demand the service provided by an information Web site, the harder it gets for that site to provide that information. CNN/MSNBC/et al don't buckle when millions of people change the channel to watch O.J. meander down a Los Angeles freeway or the opening salvos of the Iraq War.

In an online world where businesses are spending billions trying to shift information consumption patterns onto the Web, how can these outages be tolerated? You're right, it's very easy to navigate elsewhere if you can't find what you are looking for on Site A. But if you can't depend on Site A in times of crisis, you're not going to go back there in future times of crisis, hurting the reputation of that site as a reliable source of information.

Even Google was unable to handle the load. And if Google can't, nobody can. This is a serious problem for online businesses, especially as people continue to come online in emerging economies and with mobile devices.

Declan: I was using Google News pretty frequently during the time that Michael Jackson's fate was uncertain, and noticed no problems. Others, including some of our colleagues, did. I suspect that Google is using a different set of servers for Google News vs. its main search engine. So it's not so much that Google couldn't design a system to handle an unusual spike in traffic, but that it chose not to do so.

Let me put this argument another way: You said that the Internet "fail[s] at the moment of truth" but lauded "existing communication networks" that supposedly work just fine. Well, existing communication networks fail too. If more than a small fraction of telephone customers try to get a dial tone at once, there's a problem. Ever try to make a call on Mother's Day or with a cell phone at a conference? You're likely to get a fast busy signal or "all circuits are busy" message. Telephone companies could design for higher usage, but have chosen not to. They've figured out that the costs outweigh the benefits.

(Similarly, printed newspapers sell out very, very early on days like Election Day. Is this "fail[ing] at the moment of truth?")

It's really more of an economic than an engineering problem. Is it worth it to add an extra, say, threefold server and bandwidth capacity for that hour or so a year when it's needed? Or pay Akamai's overage charges? Probably not; the revenue may not cover the fees. So if your average rate is 100 users/sec, you might build for 1,000 users/sec max and then not be able to handle those once-a-year occasions when the rate is 5,000 users/sec.

An economist might say the solution to this situation is to ration by price. News pages might normally be free, but under times of high load, a micropayment would be charged. That way, the people who want or need the information the most would get it. Of course this means we need a micropayment infrastructure; I'm not holding my breath...

Tom: We're talking about how to respond to instant demand for information in the modern era. You're right, telephone networks can get overwhelmed. That's why we haven't used the telephone as the primary information source since "Thriller" was released.

Television doesn't get overwhelmed in these situations. The entire state of California could turn to CNN right now and nothing would flinch. If the entire state of California clicked on this story right now, our building might explode.

The Internet has choke points that will limit its ability to be the primary source of information to the world. Yet, companies continue to build businesses around the idea of the Internet as a dominant source of information to the world, neglecting the thorny networking problems that will only continue to get worse as traffic grows and our demand for real-time news increases.

Declan: Aha! I think we're nearing agreement.

We know that providing servers and purchasing bandwidth to handle millions of people an hour is expensive, and may not always scale well. One way to deal with this is to make it much easier for ad-supported news organizations to purchase overflow capacity; perhaps the additional revenue would justify the additional expense. If there's sufficient demand, I'm sure someone will come up with it if Akamai doesn't offer it already. Or news organizations could strip extraneous graphics off of their sites for that hour or so of peak usage--basically entering an emergency text-only mode. (Anyone still using the Lynx Web browser would love it!)

Another option is to recognize the limitations of the medium. Because radio and TV are broadcast, they'll always be more efficient at reaching hundreds of millions of people at once. So maybe CNN.com can't compete with CNN Headline News right now. But if the worst that happens is major news Web sites get a little slow for some 30 minutes a year, I'm not going to worry about The Death Of Online News; the Internet is robust and distributed enough that sufficiently important information about the next 9/11 attack will be distributed one way or another.

In other words, until we achieve technocratical perfection, there's nothing wrong with a bit of redundancy in our lives: keep that old transistor radio and some spare batteries around for a backup.

Tom: Seriously, we didn't even talk about the real Achillies Heel in this whole system: the power grid.

Michael Jackson, who along with four of his brothers recorded his first hit songs as a child, continues to be a chart topper a day after his death.

On Friday, Jackson's music was attracting huge audiences at Apple's iTunes and Amazon.com. On iTunes, the Web's largest music service, 8 out of the top-10-selling albums for download were from Jackson, with a compilation album, "The Essential Michael Jackson" in the No. 1 spot.

Jackson held the same number of top-10 positions among iTunes music videos. Jackson's "Thriller" music video, one of the hallmarks of his career as well as the genre, was the top seller. Of the top-selling songs at iTunes, Jackson held 5 of the top 10 positions. At Amazon, 10 of the top 25 albums for download belonged to Jackson.

When it came to CDs, Jackson held 17 of the top 20 spots, including all of the top 10.

These are just a few of he ways that the size of the singer's celebrity is illuminated. Download sales skyrocket, scores of fans watch his YouTube music videos, news sites are nearly overwhelmed. Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:25 p.m. PT on Thursday after collapsing at a rental home in Los Angeles. According to numerous published reports, an autopsy was due to be performed Friday.

When news started to spread that the performer had collapsed, it drove a massive wave of people to the Web for details about his condition. The ensuing traffic crush nearly crippled several large media sites, according to Keynote Systems, which tracks site performance.

At Google's YouTube, fans flocked to view his music videos, such as "Thriller" and "Beat It," and the ensuing traffic appeared to bog down the streaming quality. It took me a half hour to watch the 13-minute "Thriller" video. Fans also began uploading their own videos to YouTube in honor of Jackson. The site is already hosting thousands of fan-produced YouTube clips reacting to the news of his death, according to Google, including vlogs and tribute dances.

At about 5:30 p.m. PT on Thursday, the "Thriller" video had been viewed just more than 37 million times and had about 105,000 comments. It's unclear how many times it had been watched or how many comments the video had before Jackson's death. But by late Friday morning, "Thriller" had accumulated 38,619,665 views, or more than 1.6 million since yesterday and 144,676 comments.

"I took a screenshot of the MJ YouTube Channel shortly after news broke about his death," YouTube spokesman Spencer Crooks said in an e-mail. "The channel views are up about 3 million. The channel subscribers are up nearly 50,000 and climbing. Most of the popular videos are up at least a million views. These are not exact numbers, as I took the screenshot after the news broke, and they are all still rising fast."

This story was corrected at 9:48 a.m. Details are below.

Michael Jackson's position in long-time efforts to make the much-coveted Beatles catalog available digitally is one of the most misunderstood aspects in the very complicated negotiations.

The sudden death of one of the world's best known entertainers on Thursday will have no impact on whether songs from the Fab Four will finally make it to iTunes and other Web music stores. Rumors aside, no deals are imminent, music sources told CNET News.

Jackson bought ATV Music Publishing, the company that owned the words and music to 250 Beatles songs, nearly 25 years ago. He sold a 50 percent share in the company to Sony in 1995 and together they operated Sony/ATV. The actual recordings of the Beatles playing their songs is owned by EMI, one of the four largest music labels, and Apple Corp., the company that looks after the Beatles' business holdings and rights.

What that means is that if you want to record and release a version of "Help," then you need to compensate Sony/ATV. A filmmaker wishing to add a recording of the Beatles performing the song to a soundtrack must negotiate with EMI and Apple Corp.

In the latter scenario, Sony/ATV would collect a share of that deal and could veto it since the company owns the copyrights to the music and words. That typically doesn't happen, and to be clear: Sony/ATV has never stood in the way of a digital deal for the Beatles catalog, according to sources with knowledge of the negotiations. Indeed, the sources said that Jackson and Sony/ATV welcomed it.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Jackson was in financial trouble at the time of his death. Jackson borrowed twice against his Sony/ATV stake, according to the Journal story. How that will affect Jackson's stake in Sony/ATV, which was held in trust, is unclear.

"Jackson was incredibly proud of his association with Sony/ATV Music Publishing and his role in the company," said a company representative. "He was a great partner."

Correction: Michael Jackson borrowed against his stake in Sony/ATV, and how that will impact the company is unclear.

This story was updated multiple times after it was originally published, including with a Keynote System statement that it erred in assessing the performance of ABCNews.com and other media news sites.

It turns out many of the Internet's top news sites fared better at handling the glut of traffic following the death of singer Michael Jackson than previously thought.

Keynote Systems, a company that tracks site performance, said Friday that it erred in measuring performance for news sites and issued incorrect information Thursday evening.

Dan Berkowitz, Keynote's spokesman, said the most important thing was to correct the record about ABCNews.com, which he said delivered pages to visitors close to normally during the hour-long traffic spike following Jackson's death. He added that the company is still studying the causes of the error. A representative for Disney, which owns ABC, said the company saw "no dips in performance" as a result of the traffic glut.

While Keynote's assessment of site performance may have been overly bleak, many news sites were slow to deliver pages and in some cases were inaccessible at times.

When news of the iconic performer's death began trickling out, scores of people turned to the Web for information. TMZ broke the news that Jackson, 50, known for producing some of the world's best selling records, including "Thriller" and "Bad," had died Thursday afternoon, but the gossip hub cited only unnamed sources and offered few details. As other news services turned their attention to the story and as the public took to the Web to learn more about the performer's condition, some Web sites began slowing down.

Some Google users complained that the search engine's News area was inaccessible for a time.

A Google representative confirmed that "between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson."

CNN.com appeared to be sluggish delivering Jackson stories at times. In its defense, the news organization said that the site saw 20 million page views and a fivefold increase in traffic (from where it was prior to when news about Jackson's death began widely circulating) in one hour.

Even before Jackson's death, Thursday was a big day for news sites as word of actress Farrah Fawcett's death hit the wires in the morning and continued interest in the scandal surrounding South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The traffic deluge came swiftly and lasted for about a half hour, according to internal data here at CNET News, which saw twice the normal amount of hourly traffic shortly after word of Jackson's death spread. At sister site CBSNews.com, traffic numbers were five times their normal levels.

On Friday, antivirus vendor Sophos reported on a wave of spam related to Jackson's death that claims to have vital information about the news event. There are no malicious URLs in the spam, but recipients who reply to the message are then providing proof that the e-mail address is legitimate and will likely be targeted in future spam campaigns, the company said.

Corrected on June 26 at 4:07 p.m. PT: Keynote Systems, the source for Web site performance supplied CNET News with incorrect data. ABCNews.com's performance following the death of Michael Jackson was near optimal.