Where were you when you heard Michael Jackson had died? It really doesn’t matter I’m afraid. Sorry.

We’re living in a time when information is more mobile than ever and things happen FAST even in your pocket. You don’t need to be there, you just need a hotspot. The video above shows the news breaking on Twitscoop, which tracks Twitter trends. It’s fascinating, this is how information behaves in real time, it’s alive.

All of the frantic information, rumour and then iPhone scrambles for valid news sources to verify the story, led to a massive spike in internet data usage. Twitter was groaning under the strain, think of the poor birdies trying to lift that massive King-of-Pop sized whale…

In fact Twitter became the star of the show, as in addition to the turmoil in Iran, Michael Jackson’s death was something which offered one of its first true tests, the world was really relying on it to find out what was happening. It’s no good Googling “Michael Jackson Cardiac Arrest” in the middle of the night when you suspect someone is surely pulling your leg, there’s no cached information to draw on. MJ hadn’t had the foresight to put out a press release or preschedule his multiple organ failure to coincide with the evening news (although Uri Geller seemed strangely available for comment). No, Twitter is the immediacy search engine™, the only way to find out what’s going on right now. No wonder so many important people are frightened of it.

And so maybe it’s fitting that Twitter also offers up the best tribute to Michael Jackson I’ve come across so far, the inspired Billie Tweets by 9Astronauts. I could try and explain but it’s easier if you just click this link and see it for yourself.

Amazing.

These really are fascinating times we’re living in.

Rest in peace Michael.

I just found out about the Web2DNA Art Project, which will analyse any website and create an image of it’s ‘DNA’:

The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure.

H1 is brighter than H2, which is brighter than H3.
TABLE is brighter than TR, which is brighter than TD tags.
Images and flash elements appear as 70% white.
New HTML tags like STRONG and EM is brighter than older ones like B and I
UL, OL and DL is brighter than their LI, DT, DD
DIV layout is brighter than table layout

Basically a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code.

The image above is of this site, but you can try it with any URL. For some reason though, it doesn’t work in Firefox…

Thanks to Martin for the link…

I just saw this over at Wired. It’s a great explanation of the complexities of the web, and how blogs work for the slightly less technical minded such as myself. It shows just how far your words can go and just how extensive the data machine behind the web really is. It’s presented in a nice way too.

I also checked out Matthew Hurst’s own site, where there are some lovely visualisations of the ‘blogosphere’ making the intangible tangible. Well, in an intangible kind of way…

Found this great visual trace tool on Uneasysilence. It lets you see how the data which makes up your website actually gets to the viewer, through various servers and gateways. It uses Google Maps to show you, so you can zoom around and look at it as a map or a satellite image as usual.

The image here shows the route for holster.co.uk

I thought I’d post these amazing images, which visualise data from the globe, the above graphic showing global population density. I originally found them appropriately on Ffffound! They’re based on data from the G-econ project. I just thought they were a lovely way to visualise the data, better than a spreadsheet anyway…

Here are a couple more:

Average annual rainfall:

Distance from the coast:

See more in this Flickr set.