The Death of the King of Pop as Digital Phenomena

Thanks to Wikipedia’s tech-blog we can see how Michael Jackson’s death looks from the perspective of server load and traffic:

Wikipedia Load Spike - MJ RIP

Traffic Spike

This kind of epiphenomenon is the bread-and-butter of research that tries to interpolate social causes from digital reverberations.  Not that any such research is going on, but once we’ve all grown sick of mining vulgar Latin textbooks for word preference, we’ll develop procedures to handle stuff like this.