Sam Spade's San Francisco

A reporter on Headline News (HLN) cable television network said today that the news of Michael Jackson's death caused the Internet to spike and reach it's greatest level ever. Not true!

Soon after news of Michael Jackson's death broke out on the web around 5:30 p.m., the blogosphere was filled with accounts of news sites and social networks creaking under the strain of spiking traffic.

Akamai Technologies, which delivers online content for more than 100 global news companies, said traffic peaked at about 4.2 million global visitors per minute.

To put that in perspective, however, it is actually less than half of the peak last Nov. 4, the day Barack Obama was elected president, when worldwide traffic hit 8.5 million per minute.

In fact, traffic at the 6:30 p.m. peak yesterday did not even rank in the top 15 peaks since Akamai started its net usage index on Aug. 18., 2005. Normal traffic is in the range of 2 million visitors per minute globally, Akamai said.

The truth should be retold, not re-written.
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