I Have No Idea What I am Doing

Kind of makes you wish you’d bought something at the online estate sale, huh?

The LA Times released the death annoucement, the New York Times live blogged it, and Twitter went down almost immediately and then went crazy.

I had a few interesting interactions on Twitter, including finding out the news. When stuff like this breaks, the string of credits can get lengthy. In the following string, I think we all handled it very well, crediting correctly and responding to each other.

I tweeted the following at about 2:40pm, with my first link being a shaky looking site:

• Michael Jackson died?! Is this true? http://bit.ly/4d08p6 Earlier E story about rushing to hospital http://bit.ly/14JwcG

And then around 3:40pm got a link to the New York Times live blog from @Carr2n, which is David Carr of the New York Times (whose book Night of the Gun I am reading and who I started following after he talked about Twitter at his reading). He was retweeting another NYT reporter:

• rt @brianstelter Here’s the NYT’s live-blog about Michael Jackson. http://bit.ly/IgVQS Contributions, tips, questions welcome.

Shortly after my friend @jacksaturn retweeted @Pampelmoose (who is Dave Allen of Gang of Four):

• RT @Pampelmoose Re Michael Jackson – does anyone have a more reliable news source than TMZ?

so I wrote back this this:

• NYT on Jackson @jacksaturn @Pampelmoose RT @carr2n @brianstelter Here’s the NYT’s live-blog about Michael Jackson. http://bit.ly/IgVQS

That phrasing accomplishes a few things. One, it puts the tweet out there to everyone, where as if I’d started with the @jacksaturn it would not show up for people who opted not to receive my replies (you can select to see all messages or just tweets of someone you follow). It also credits @carr2n and @brainstelter while passing the info back to both @Pamelmoose, who originally asked the question, and my friend @jacksaturn. Phew!

One thing to note, none of us were using the #, which people use to track big events like this, probably because we are just interested in communicating to our own audience/friends, and also because the # tags take some time to develop as more people start to use the same one.

The Morph of Trending Topics From Source to Subject

Within a half hour, the trending topics went from the LA Times, the source of the breaking news about his death, to MJ and his work, primarily Thriller.  The White House luau is going on, but it’s not trending. CBS news correspondent @markknoller is doing a lovely job of tweeting it, such as this:

• The Obamas all wearing leis as they arrived at the luau. Bo the puppy was along too. Obama introduced him as the star of the family.
  

As of right now, 4:20pm Pacific, #MichaelJackson and #RIP MJ are trending, but the #LA Times is first:

At 4:26pm the LA Times is still holding, likely because people are confirming the information with the source:

Now at 4:30pm, weird looking isn’t it? P is the end of R.I.P, Twitter is just picking up the P:

Ten minutes later the above is more or less stabilizing, with P Michael still at the top. A few people are trying to get the Iran election (#iranelection) back on the trending topics by using it and urging others to return to it, I retweeted @OregonMedia saying this:

• Oh, for heaven’s sake. #iranelection #iranelection #iranelection. Get the darn thing back on Trending Topics already.

But then again I also retweeted these:

• RT @matthewbaldwin BREAKING NEWS: King of Pop dies; Prince ascends to the throne.

• RT @pedalpalooza RT @BikePortland MJ Memorial Ride: 6:30, meet at Peace Garden above Esplanade on east side of Steel Bridge. Wear one glove.

So I can’t say I’m helping. I am chuckling, though.

4:52pm, let’s take another look at trending topics:

Hey! Farrah Fawcett, who also died today after a battle with cancer, has reached second. People have replaced R.I.P with the full phrase Rest In Peace, which is being correctly picked up by Twitter instead of the P we were seeing before. You can also see MSNbc on the bottom, and Ed McMahon, who died two days ago, is probably on there because people are tweeting about all three deaths as a set.

At 4:59pm, we’re seeing the LA Times again and now the BBC, who are running a memorial program right now on air. Plus, Farrah Fawcett is number one:

Now at 5:15 we’re seeing Michael Jackson and his song titles regaining, potentially because more memorial announcements are being made including his songs. KEXP of Seattle just announced that Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie will be doing a live, acoustic rendition of Thriller on air later, for example, and that news is likely being tweeted. (Aside: you couldn’t pay me to listen to that.)

@carr2n just posted, and seeing how his retweet of the NY Times live blog started my Twitter Thrill, it’s fitting to have him end it too:

• carr2n rt @toomarvelous I don’t recall where I was when Buddy Holly died. But I’ll recall where I was when Michael Jackson died. I was on Twitter.

End note: This NPR story by Linda Holmes has a gorgeous line paragraph about the moonwalk and a link to the video below. I got chills hearing the scream she’s talking about.
“For many, many people, this was the first opportunity they had to see this incarnation of him. This is where everyone I knew first saw the moonwalk, and if you weren’t there or didn’t watch it or maybe weren’t a kid at the time, you cannot imagine what a big deal it was. I was in middle school, and I think we all tried it. You can hear the crowd scream when he does it here — it’s not a scream of recognition, like it would be when he did it later. It’s a scream of shock. ”

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.