It's been a while since my last blog, and lots of things have happened. Most notably the death of Michael Jackson, his death shocked the world almost three weeks ago. People will always ask the question: 'Where were you when you found out Michael Jackson had died?' My answer would be at The Railway Inn in Winchester watching a couple of my friend's bands play a gig. How did I find out? Via Twitter, that's how! The micro-blogging social networking phenomenon that is taking the internet by storm informed me of the sad news that Michael Jackson had died. Lots of my friends were tweeting that he had suffered a heart attack before the confirmed reports came in that he had indeed died. After reading those tweets on twitter I checked my facebook friend's status updates and sure enough almost every status was about MJ. I think that the true power of twitter was shown that night as many people must have heard of MJ's death via twitter. Within minutes of the news spreading MJ was already in the list of trending topics and soon reached the top trending topic on the site. Twitter also crashed for a while because there were so many tweets about MJ being posted!
In the weeks prior to MJ's death I had become addicted to twitter and without it who knows how I would have found out the news? I think the reason why twitter is so popular is because of its accessibility, not only can you tweet via the twitter website but there are hundreds of applications that allow you to tweet so easily. For example, I have TwitterBerry and UberTwitter on my BlackBerry, TweetDeck on my PC and TwitterFox – an add-on for internet browser FireFox. All of these offer simple and easy ways to tweet and to keep up with the latest updates from your friends/celebrities whom you may follow.
Twitter wasn't the only website to collapse under the weight of MJ's death, other sites included TMZ - the site who first confirmed that he was dead, the LA Times website and Perez Hilton's famous celebrity blog. Google also found it hard to cope the surge of traffic and therefore when searching for Michael Jackson all users got was an error message because the site thought it was under attack. This shows how popular MJ really was, imagine the amount of people that are using the internet now, it would be a very large number, but then imagine the amount of people it would take to crash the internet, this must have been such an extraordinary amount of people frantically searching the internet for news about the MJ's death.
The funny thing about it was I was going to buy tickets for me and my mum for one of Micheal Jackson's O2 Arena shows but my mum said 'he'll never make it'. She didn't think he would die but rather just thought he wouldn't be physically well enough to do the shows. Very eerie!
