It never ceases to amaze me how people care so much more about celebrity life. Some guy who could sing and dance dies and I can't turn on my TV without hearing about it, meanwhile some doctor who spent the better half of their career treating children with terminal cancer dies and nobody cares.
It's never nice to hear about someone dying, but I don't feel any more sad about Michael Jackon's death than I would about Joe the Plumber's. He's just some guy I never met and don't know. Thousands of those people die every day.
Once the mass public caught word of the story, Google, AOL, CNN, and other sites reported the Web slowing down to a sickly crawl. The search engine titan, Google, initially believed they were under attack: The sheer number of people querying the star's death caused many of them to receive an error page informing them that "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application."
Twitter's servers buckled and collapsed under the weight of thousands of people tweeting the breaking news; before the servers died, they noted that nearly 66,500 people had mentioned "Michael Jackson" in their latest tweets. By Thursday afternoon, the number of Twitter posts about the King of Pop had reached 100,000 per hour.