We can’t help but talk about this. Love him, hate him or don’t give a damn, Michael Jackson was one seriously talented dude, writing and producing some of the best music of our generation as well as redefining pop culture and creating a new musical genre.  He achieved a level of fame rarely equaled before or since - people passed out when he came on stage.  That’s some serious adoration.

Still, it’s shocking to see the ripple effect of MJ’s death on social media, the web and our “21st-centurified” life as a whole.   To put the true impact in more tangible terms: Google and Twitter both crashed under the burden of hundreds of millions of web surfing fans of the late pop star.

In the US alone, Google saw 36 of the top 100 searches related to Jackson’s death.  The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes, people searching Google News saw a “We’re sorry” page.  Additionally, Google saw one of the largest mobile search spikes ever, with 5 of the top 20 searches about the Moonwalker.

Those same searchers eventually wound up on Twitter to pay their respects.  In the UK it was documented that Twitter had it’s busiest day EVER.  Across the globe, the social media site buckled under an unprecedented spike in Tweets.

“According to analysis tool Twist, 22.6 per cent of the messages posted were about Jackson.  Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke.  “It is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the US presidential election.”"

Rumor has it that AT&T experienced the highest number of text messages ever.  Grief stricken fans have swamped Amazon.com and iTunes to purchase some of the late artist’s hits. According to a Wall Street Journal Article…

“Amazon said sales of Jackson CDs were more than 700 times greater on Thursday than they were the previous day and accounted for 60% of all music sales on the site yesterday. Demand was so great that Amazon ran out of stock within minutes after his death was reported, the company said.  Amazon [is] working with Sony Corp.’s (SNE) music unit to restock supplies as quickly as possible, but shoppers buying Jackson material will now have to wait one to three weeks before it is shipped.

Thirteen of the top 20 selling albums on iTunes Friday were by Jackson, including No. 1 seller “The Essential Michael Jackson”. Some 40 of the top 100 songs on iTunes were Jackson tracks. Meanwhile, Jackson’s videos accounted for 16 of the top 20 sellers in that category.”

Even news media sites felt the strain of Jackobsession.  Major slowdowns began in late afternoon on June 25th for ABC, AOL, LA Times and CBS.  From 6 - 8 pm EDT, those sites were down to nearly 10% availability.  The below chart compares the number of blog posts in 2009 as related to President Barack Obama, the Swine Flu and the King of Pop.  (Note the blue line to the far right of the chart.)

And people are paying tribute to the King of Pop the internet over.  Local band SOAP posted their rendition of “Don’t Stop ‘Till you Get Enough” to honor his life in death.  (Check it out.)  By Friday, Last.FM reported a record 42,000 streams of Michael Jackson songs in two hours.

Simply put, in this day and age of immediacy and excess of access to information, the hype over the death of Michael Jackson has compounded itself.  (And, apparently, the true measure of fame can now be calculated on the number of post-mortem Tweets, Google searches and iTunes downloads.)

More than anything, it’s as if people are using the ways of the web to help them deal with this lingering feeling of unfinished business.  The internet is really the best photo album out there - it reminds us of the trends we mimicked (red leather jacket), of the humanitarian needs that call to us all (We Are the World), and of the man who inspired and shaped the pop artists of today (Kanye West, Usher, Britney Spears, JT, to name a few).  It also helps us remember a legend the glorious and rockin’ way he was… rather than a legacy of bankruptcy, pedophilia, the mysterious dangling baby incident, face masks and plastic surgery gone bad (gawd - that nose!).

We don’t know about you, but the past few days have left us worse for the wear. Maybe because now that he’s gone the world’s reaction has made us realize what I haven’t considered for the past decade: just how big a deal Michael Jackson was, even when he wasn’t.

Is this how people felt when Elvis died?

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