Michael Jackson traffic melts entire Internet

Valleywag had an interesting post about Internet traffic spiking because of news about Michael Jackson's death. Some of the figures include:

• CNN's traffic grew fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
• Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama's election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook status updates tripled.
  
• AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
  
• TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson's death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
  
• The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
• For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren't working on Google News.
  
• Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson's page.

Amazing.

Media columnist rails against HuffPo

Advertising Age's media columnist, Simon Dumenco, takes a shot at the Huffington Post by saying it de-values content and drums up page views by featuring risqué pics of celebs.

What it comes down to is this: What is the Huffington Post, really? It likes to pretend that it's a respectable voice in the mediasphere, but it shamelessly pumps up its traffic by being just as trashy as, say, Maxim. It also likes to masquerade as a forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting journalistic institution, but it pays only a handful of actual journalists, and its idea of "journalism" is often downright parasitic of the work of real journalistic institutions.

Any thoughts?