As this morning’s sad news broke that ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson has passed away, a sad day for pop music and fans worldwide – but it also brought with it a wave of emotion across the internet and a new era of online mourning. Previous iconic losses like Diana, John Lennon, Elvis have impacted the public but never before have we had such an icon die at a time when the media generation is at its’ most ripe – which saw the breaking news spreading globally in just seconds….

Already Michael Jackson has taken up a third of all twitter subjects – including celebrity tweets of condolence including Demi Moore and P Diddy, and according to the London Evening Standard the mass of online users wanting to clarify the singer's death caused even Google's software to play up – with its computers used for running the news section to interpret the "Michael Jackson" requests as an automated attack for around half an hour.

This morning, of the top ten most popular web topics – 6 of them revolved around the Jackson news, the BBC News website also reported at 4am that its UK web traffic was up 48% than usual. Further to this the news has led to an unprecedented rise in Michael Jackson online music sales – taking up the Top 15 places on Amazon.com's bestsellers list. iTunes has also been bombarded – with three other Jackson singles and albums in the top 25. The news first broke on American site www.tmz.com this morning which reported it was "looking bad" for the star – the overload of interest meant the site actually went down temporarily, yet of course the news is still being spread via blogs, twitter and social networking sites ….and continues to do so…..