The death of Michael Jackson has set the web on fire.
The L. A. Times reported at 3:15 p.m. that the pop star had been officially pronounced dead. Shortly after, the newspaper's Web site went down.
Two hours later, Jackson's name rocketed its way to the top of today's Twitter updates and searches. It seems the micro-blogging service couldn't handle the volume of traffic either as it experienced yet another of its well-known outages. Before Twitter's servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates -- not to mention the several misspelled versions of his name.
Jackson quickly became the most searched items in Google, hands down. Seven of the top ten most popular searches for today involved Jackson in some way, according to Google Trends. In its "hotness" gauge, Google describes searches for "michael jackson died" as "volcanic."
Early reports of Jackson's death also caused an uncontainable flurry of edits and corrections in Wikipedia as editors undid updates and tried to contain the wave of contributors eager to register the pop star's death on the community encyclopedia.
"ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP," wrote one of the many frustrated editors who deleted Jackson's date of death. At the time, Jackson's death hadn't been officially declared.
More collateral damage from the online frenzy came in the form of false rumors of other celebrities' deaths. Most likely triggered by the same-day deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, it wasn't long before fake stories sprung on the web claiming Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum had also died. News outlets, commentators and bloggers have jumped in to dismiss the claims.
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