With Jackson Entry, Wikipedia May Have Set a Record

By: Noam Cohen  Source : www.nytimes.com

The Michael Jackson entry in Wikipedia Thursday evening appeared to have set the record as having the highest traffic in the eight-year history of the online encyclopedia.

In the 7 p.m. hour alone Thursday, shortly after Mr. Jackson’s death was confirmed, there were nearly one million visitors to that article. (In fact, for that hour more than 250,000 visitors went to the misspelled entry “Micheal Jackson.” Even his brother Randy Jackson had 25,000 visits that hour.)

“We suspect this is most in a one-hour period of any article in Wikipedia history,” said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

The rush of visitors overwhelmed the server dedicated to “cached” versions of popular articles — which, in essence, protect the main servers from having too much traffic. “The cached server got slammed pretty quickly” and “went out,” Mr. Walsh said. This, in turn, led to “some fluttering of access and server timeouts.” 

Befitting his role in the culture, Michael Jackson was among the first people to have an article on Wikipedia. It was created in Wikipedia’s first year, 2001, and has been edited more than 19,000 times, making it one of the most edited ever, Mr. Walsh said.

In the course of only a few hours Thursday, there were 1.8 million visits to the Michael Jackson article. (Or about 1 percent of total Wikipedia traffic that entire day.) On Friday, the total could easily reach five million visits. By way of comparison, another article with huge traffic, Barack Obama’s, was viewed by 2.3 million on Election Day.

With Jackson News, a Surge in Web Traffic

By: Brian Stelter   Source : www.nytimes.com

Did your Internet connection seem slow Thursday afternoon? It very likely wasn’t your computer; it was the surge of interest in Michael Jackson’s hospitalization and death.

Akamai said that traffic to news Web sites spiked around 6 p.m. Eastern, clocking in at one point at 4.2 million visitors a minute. During the rest of the day, the sites tracked by Akamai never exceeded 3 million visitors a minute.

Some entertainment news Web sites including EOnline.com and PerezHilton.com appeared to load more slowly than normal. Sometimes they did not load at all, according to the observations of several reporters early Thursday evening.

Even Google had trouble keeping up. Between 5:40 p.m. and 6:15 p.m. Eastern, after TMZ.com had said Mr. Jackson had died, some visitors to Google News “experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson,” a Google spokesman said. 

AIM, the instant messaging service operated by AOL, collapsed for about 40 minutes amid all the Jackson attention. The service was “undergoing a previously scheduled software update” at the time, the company said in a statement to PC Magazine.

The company called the day “a seminal moment in Internet history.” It said: “We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth. Historically, celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviors — searching, sharing and reacting to the news followed by online tributes has become the modern way to mourn. Princess Diana was the first notable Internet example. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are the latest.”

The social messaging service Twitter had thousands of tweets about Michael Jackson every minute. “We saw more than double the normal tweets per second the moment the news broke — the biggest increase since the US presidential election (and Twitter has grown tremendously since then),” one of Twitter’s co-founders, Biz Stone, told a sister blog Bits.

Some TV news anchors took note of the slowdown. “My computer is having a very difficult time right now,” remarked Shepard Smith, a Fox News anchor, who surmised the delays were due to the intense interest in Mr. Jackson.

However, the servers for TMZ.com, which broke much of the news about Mr. Jackson, did not seem sluggish. TMZ held a live chat and even simulcast a local Fox affiliate’s coverage on Thursday evening.

Noam Cohen contributed reporting.

Lady In my Life

Michael Jackson Pepsi

Will You Be There

In memory of Michael…

In memory of the King of Pop, a wonderful video of 1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines practicing the dance to M. J’s hit “Thriller”.

Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center is a maximum security prison in Cebu, in the Cebu Province, the Philippines.

Byron Garcia, the official security advisor to the Cebu government who was assigned as head of the prison by Gwendolyn Garcia, governor of Cebu Province is credited for starting a program of choreographed exercise routines for the inmates.The prison is best known worldwide for their version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. They have followed that with many other dance routines of popular songs.

The prison management has also released a video explaining the concept behind the prison management at CPDRC.

Beginnings

Byron Garcia originally wanted to introduce a program at Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) where inmates would exercise for an hour each day. He saw waves of prisoners in the exercise yard and thought it looked good. He also claims in a British documentary that his inspiration came while watching the movie The Shawshank Redemption in particular the scene where the sounds of Mozart’s Figaro flood the prison yard.

Garcia initially introduced an exercise program where the prisoners marched in unison, starting out with marching to the beat of a drum, but moved on to dancing to pop music; he began with one of his favourite songs, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”. He chose camp music such as In The Navy and Y.M.C.A. by The Village People, so macho prisoners would not be offended at being asked to dance.
Garcia’s first upload of prisoner choreography was the Algorithm March, but this was almost entirely ignored. But the next upload Thriller had a massive response.

The prison now even has its own official choreographer teachers, like Vince Rosales and Gwen Laydor. Some prisoners are chosen more prominently for more sophisticated routines while the general prison population (sometimes up to 1500 inmates) participate with simpler more accessible routines.

Thriller viral video

Main article: Thriller (viral video)

Thriller was uploaded on July 17, 2007. It was a YouTube remake of Michael Jackson’s original “Thriller” music video.

Crisanto Nierre plays Michael Jackson’s role in the video. The openly gay inmate Wenjiel Resane plays the role of Michael Jackson’s girlfriend. Both Crisanto Nierre and Wenjiel Resane enjoy popularity amongst You Tube fans and their faces usually highlighted quite often in most later videos.

On December 19, 2007, in an article on “Most Popular Viral Videos”, Time Magazine placed the inmates’ Cebu Thriller as 5th in its Top 10 list. Time’s stated description of the prisoners was: “Orange-jumpsuited accused murderers, rapists and drug dealers paid homage to Michael Jackson’s Thriller in a dance performance filmed at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines (CPDRC).”

Public performances

On October 6, 2007, Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal visited CPDRC for the first time, and the prisoners performed six dances for him, as part of the celebration of the Prison Awareness Month; the Archbishop noted, “It was a marvelous show of discipline. If only they had practiced that (discipline) in their lives, they wouldn’t be here.”

Some chosen inmates of CPDRC (about 20 in number) performed a surprise show (a medley of “Thriller”, “Jump” and “Radio Gaga”) in front of the Cebu Capitol. This performance was a request by the inmates as their contribution to the 438th Founding anniversary celebration. The Governor and Provincial Officials were so moved that they included all 1500 inmates in the giving of the mid-year bonus for Capitol employees. Each inmate was given 1,000 Philippines pesos ($US 22) an incentive for good behavior.
On December 27, 2007, Vice Mayor Michael Rama, acting mayor of Cebu City, noted the inmates’ request to be in the Sinulog Festival as Sinulog Foundation executive director Ricky Ballesteros informed the former of the possibility of CPDRC’s participation. Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia took part in some of the dancing exercises with the prisoners.

A performance of the “Thriller” routine at Cebu City’s Founding Day celebrations resulted in a donation of 1.6 million pesos. Each inmate received 1000 pesos.
“Together in Electric Dreams” by Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder, and Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice were presented during the provincial governor Gwendolyn Garcia visit to the prison, on her birthday in October. There was even a competition who would take the lead role of Vanilla Ice in the dance.

Starting April, 2008, Cebu provincial inmates’ live dances are open to visitors who watch from the higher corridors the dance routines. After the 2 hour monthly program (done on certain Saturdays), visitors can have their pictures taken with the prisoners and buy souvenir prison shirts.

References:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/topic/cpdrc+inmates/

http://en.wordpress.com/tag/cpdrc-inmates/

Michael Jackson Islam

Michael Jackson revert to Islam after searching Peace for Soul and Mind

The singer changed his name to Mikaeel in a ceremony at a friend’s Los Angeles home.

Islam in my Veins……

Black or White

Michael Jackson – Black or White Lyrics: I Took My Baby On A Saturday Bang Boy Is That Girl With You Yes We’re One And The Same Now I Believe In Miracles And A Miracle Has Happened Tonight……..

Earth

Michael Jackson – Earth Song Lyric: What about sunrise? What about rain? What about all the things, That you said we were to gain? What about killing fields? Is there a time?

Smooth Criminal