News of Michael Jackson's death has spread like wildfire around the Web. The first reaction a friend had when hearing the news last night was to Google the question "is he really dead"? TechCrunch reported on how a number of sites have gone down because of the amount of traffic around the news, while Michael's music videos are dominating viral video charts. LastFM shared this chart showing how people have been listening to his music in high volumes today (more than 40 000 times). There have been a number of fairly lame jokes emailed around as well.

It's interesting to see how everything related to Michael Jackson has been playing out on the Web. Because the Internet is home to all kinds of content - video, music, text - it's working as an archive for our experience of the King of Pop.

What makes the global access to Michael's music so astounding is that we can measure it - we know how it's happening around the world and can track what people are listening to and watching. Importantly we can see what people are creating too - images, videos and mashups. 

We used some functionality from our own BrandsEye to track where most of the conversation has been coming from. It's dominated by the US, but is clearly of global interest (click on the image to enlarge):

When the world shares an interest it's amazing to see how a certain idea or fact can dominate the Web. R.I.P.