A CNN article today talks about how Michael Jackson’s death ‘almost takes the internet with him.’ While it is true that several web sites experienced incredible surges in activity, as exemplified by Twitter’s search delay, I found it interesting that the event did not reach the top 15 events for internet news traffic, as measured by Akamai. The Net News Index measures visitors to more than 100 global news portals. Yesterday between 6 and 7 p.m. EST the index measured 4,247,971 visitors per minute, obviously as a result of Michael Jackson’s death, first announced by TMZ around 5:20 p.m. EST.

As I mentioned before, yesterday’s traffic peak did not make into the top 15 events, measured since the index’s inception in August 18, 2005. In the following graph due to space constraints I am not including the times of day; full details are available here at Akamai’s website.

However this may not be an accurate gauge for yesterday’s internet activity. There was certainly a lot of buzz going around Twitter and Facebook; something not accounted for in the Akamai Net News index. Social networks have grown greatly in importance as a vehicle for news and personal communication and I think that any measurement of overall internet activity should take it into account. Unfortunately I am not sure of how to accurately measure Tweeting; please let me know if you happen to know of any analytics tools for that. I’ll be taking a look into search traffic at Google Trends at week’s end when the numbers are up for Thursday. That may provide further insight into how busy the net was yesterday.