I thought about this blog post on Michael Jackson’s death for a while before writing it – on the fence as to whether it was relevant to readers, but I’ve been told over the past few days that it would make a good topic for the blog by more than a few people in the company.  But, quite frankly, I believe it to have absolutely no consequential effect on network performance, and his death, as well as the effects of his death on the Internet, really give us no new insight nor information about either networking or the Internet as a whole.  

An argument that Jackson’s death created a spike in traffic that took down Google News for 25 minutes could be made, and it’s more or less true that people searching for Michael Jackson weren’t able to access the site.  However, other news got through alright, as Google’s network performance preservations simply misinterpreted searches for Michael Jackson as a kind of a denial of service attack and redirected searchers to a static Web page.  A network performance problem in the sense that the end-users weren’t being properly served, but from Google’s perspective, what’s more likely: that you’re under DDOS, or that Michael Jackson actually died? 

Second, there’s the idea that the new media – TMZ.com, specifically - was able to get the news out an hour before CNN.  (Twitter beat CNN for access in the highly restrictive Iran, as well.) But just because Twitter reported Jacko’s death before the major television stations did, does not mean that they were accurate saying that Jeff Goldblum had died the same day from falling off a cliff in New Zealand. 

Goldblum himself went on the Colbert Report and debunked the myth by twittering himself, prompting Colbert to exclaim: “The Dead Can Twitter!” Eventually, Goldblum acquiesced, giving his own eulogy.  

The problem is that it’s not that New Media has met and surpassed the standards of traditional journalism, but that television journalism standards have dropped.  We’re not talking about sacrificing accuracy – though “The Today Show” on Nine Australia (not to be confused with the version with Al Roker) notably reported that “New Zealand Police confirmed that Goldblum died.”

You could make a case that CNN wasn’t willing to report on Michael Jackson until they could get a more reputable source than the one that TMZ used.  Even so, their actions regarding Iran show something else.  Right now, they are relying on Twitter posts – even re-appropriating the text as “sources” instead of having on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East.  CNN’s relevance in the 1990s, of course, was established by on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East and Tiananmen Square.

What this implies to me that, while Twitter has surpassed television as a news source, it is a hollow victory for new media, as television news organizations are simply not spending the money that they need to in order to have a worldwide presence and timely information; instead, it seems, the 24-hour news stations have been replaced by 24-hour talk shows where instead of breaking news, the current news of the day is instead discussed.  Done with care, there’s nothing wrong with this, but it does imply that the “news” organizations have conceded that breaking news belongs to the Internet, relegating their role to that of context provider. 

In short, Twitter beat CNN, but Twitter didn’t beat CNN at its prime.

Not that TV news and Internet news have to affect an adversarial role; indeed, CNN’s embrace (some would say over-embrace) of Twitter creates an additive relationship which can bring more context to the news; though I do not think that CNN, specifically, is using Twitter effectively – yet. 

As for Network Performance, maybe there were a few more searches for Jackson for a few hours, maybe there were a few more IMs and tweets on enterprise networks – though I doubt they affected things enough to affect network performance tremendously.