Michael Jackson, the
self-anointed king of pop,
was one of the biggest things on the Web. Peter Kafka on
All Things Digital now notes that in
Web Video Viewers Forget About Michael Jackson, at least the YouTube ones.
Kafka used the video views tracker on
TubeMogul illustrate his argument. TubeMogul's analytics package brings statistics to both publishers and gawkers on 15 top video sharing sites; some services are free for non-commercial users.
Others like
Silicon Alley Insider pronounced the Jackson meme dead on July 3. Jackson didn't even show up in the
top 50 of Google Hot Trends of July 17. Here's Google's average worldwide traffic of "michael jackson" in the
last 30 days:
Of course the major networks milked the story until fatigue set in, which spawned comments like
This Just In: Michael Jackson, Still Dead. But another observed that
Jackson’s demise allowed us "to interact with other people; to turn the news, to use the current jargon, into a ‘social object’." It's unfortunate for 800-1000 million who are slowly dying of
hunger that they are
social problem not a ‘social object’!
For a related perspective see the recent AEP post
Meme tracking and the News Cycle.
Update: for a more serious look at the phenomena see
The Man in the Mirror by Chris Hedges on Truthdig.
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