The topic on everyone’s lips this morning is the passing of Michael Jackson. One of the most well known musical artists of our time, Jackson’s death has led to a media frenzy of rumoured and unconfirmed reports.
As previously discussed on this blog, traditional media is increasingly turning to websites and blogs as official sources of information when a large news story breaks, as these websites are often able to process news stories a lot quicker.
TechCrunch.com has this morning reported that several websites such as celebrity gossip website TMZ.com, which was the first source to break the story, the LA Times Website, Perez Hilton’s gossip blog and Twitter have all crashed or experienced delays in the first few hours after the story broke, due to extremely high traffic volumes. No doubt the capacity of these websites will continue to be tested throughout the day as more news becomes available.
TechCrunch.com claims that this story is currently ‘dominating’ the web.
“And just in case you didn’t believe this story is dominating the web right now, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter are MJ-related. The lone exception is Ed McMahon, who also passed away two days ago.
“As an aside, hat tip to TechCrunch.com for its quick response taking the “hot topic” and creating newsworthy content, relevant to their own subject matter of reviewing new Internet products and companies. Way to leverage an issue!
News.com.au has also today experienced the impact of increased traffic when “big news breaks” with 900, 000 visitors to its website by 2pm today – a typical full day is 400,000 – and its internal system is predicting there will be 1.3 million visitors by the end of the day! This is proof that we now go to the web to validate word-of-mouth reports or radio “snippets”.