By Nick Turner

Last updated at 08:35, Friday, 26 June 2009

News of Michael Jackson's death exloded across the internet last night, crashing websites and causing Twitter to grind to a halt.

In years to come when people ask each other where they heard about Michael Jackson’s death the answer for many will be: On Twitter.

The shock news exploded across the internet on Thursday night and Twitter seized up for a while under the strain as thousands of people shared the news and their thoughts on the demise of the King of Pop.

Long before the death was official tributes, speculation and the odd tasteless comment swirled around Twitter.
A popular line was“First Diana, now Michael Jackson. I hope Martin Bashir never interviews me”.
Comedian Jason Manford quickly apologised when he realised he’d overstepped the mark with this comment on his Twitter page: “I've rung in sick to pull out of a gig before but this is going a bit far!”

One newspaper editor seemed to have got a bit carried away with this positing up a picture of his Jackson front page and adding this: “Now toasting MJ's life with fizz. Don't care who calls me cheesy or mawkish. You can beat it.”

BBC News24, struggling to fill some air time while it got its Jacko clips in order, took to reading out messages from Twitter.
Very soon the all the top search terms on Twitter were Jackson related, showing that the misspelling “Micheal” was being used than the correct version.

Confusingly a Twitter message from Barrack Obama appeared in the middle of all this, saying “These stories show why affordable health care for every American can't wait,” but that turned out to be about something completely different.

On Wikipedia, the conflicting reports of Jackson's health caused a short editing war between users over whether or not he had died;

The celeb website TMZ originally broke the story, but collapsed under an avalanche of traffic.

As I reflected on all of this I watched some Jackson 5 videos on Youtube. Sadly those Google ads that follow you everywhere were lagging behind and offered Jackson O2 tickets for sale.

I remember how I learned about John Lennon’s assassination – on BBC Radio – and that I saw a newspaper bill announcing the King is Dead and my Dad explaining it referred to Elvis.

The times change, but the song remains the same.

First published at 07:53, Friday, 26 June 2009
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk