How News of Michael Jackson's Death Traveled Across the Web | Hacker News Reader

How News of Michael Jackson's Death Traveled Across the Web

seomoz.org

16 pointsjerryji16 comments

It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want.

I don't think it's a big deal that the autocompletion is not updated in realtime... someone looking for info on the case will just type "michael jackson death" and find it anyway. The rest of the article was interesting.

Yeah, the real-time web cheerleading at the end of the article was really off-base.

someone looking for info on the case will just type "michael jackson death" and find it anyway

Exactly; the real question is how long it took for the news to appear in the main Google index -- at what point would googling for "michael jackson heart attach" produce useful results? I would guess very quickly after the TMZ update.

Not really. When I got texted the rumor, google/yahoo/bing produced nothing while twitter had 4034 more results to show me within a few seconds of searching.

Sure, when you checked it didn't have anything. The question is how long that state persisted.

I think that real time data is most definitely very interesting, and an area ripe for exploitation at the moment. However, I don't feel that in the majority of cases for people searching on google or any other search engine that it matters a great deal. Real time search and search in general only overlap so much. Good article otherwise.

the timeline is neat, assuming it is true.

i wish it wasn't framed by the seo part. i'd be interested in a more general and "trustworthy" (i feel weird saying that.. ?!!?) report.

(Disclaimer: I wrote this post)

What made you feel it was untrustworthy? I have a huge amount of respect for the Hacker News community (been reading this site everyday for over a year), and I would really appreciate the opportunity to be given constructive criticism.

Danny, thanks for replying so fast. Makes conversing much easier :-)

I certainly didn't mean to cast negative light on the post. I sent a link to my friends at work with the text: "Seems like a well intentioned best effort, but there are surprisingly little links to source or archive material."

I could just be a lazy jerk who doesn't want to get blamed if one piece of information happens to be wrong. Probably I should have just said "work in progress", as you did.

I did greatly appreciate the note at the bottom of the post about work-in-progress and pooling-knowledge. The honest are typically interested in openness and collaboration.

The reason why I felt like a disclaimer was necessary in my comment and to my friends was that I personally hadn't verified the claims you had made, and it wasn't obvious to me that the information was correct. I would expect to see a note on methodology: were you cycling through refreshes of different web pages? or noting "last change" dates in webpages? Are there internetarchive.com (or equivalent) perma-links that should exactly when stories occured? The wikipedia timeline highlighting is totally obvious (and easy); I'd simply like to see that kind of thing for more of the "facts". Where did the information come from. If you state it I'll believe you and feel pretty confident in the information (would probably verify later if wanted to publish an academic paper or something, but otherwise good 'nuf for random intuition :-)

Maybe I'm just paranoid in general when it comes to news.

That said, your timeline really is the bomb. It's super interesting, and I appreciate the work you did :-)

Thank you for the honest feedback and no offense taken :-)

I will be sure to make it a priority to include sources and methodology in future posts. I didn't include these in the first place because I got the impression that the audience I primarily write for (the community at SEOmoz) doesn't worry about this as much and would rather get to the "meat" of the information. If you read the comments on the post, no one even mentions sources or methodology.

That said, I am always looking for ways to make my posts better and I think acting on your advice will make my work appear more credible and professional. Thank you for your time and feedback!

x17online.com were the first to report he was rushed to UCLA but even they acknowledge that it was TMZ who broke the story that he was dead.

In the Wikipedia article history, I can find the edit you mention at 21:12 and the edit freeze at 21:45, but not the edit you mention at 21:48...

This page should show the relevant part of the history: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Jackson...

I would say Wikipedia confirmed the death at 22:27, just after MSNBC and CNN, which is consistent with Wikipedia policy of relying on mainstream sources.

This is very odd. When I viewed the page (see screenshot taken at 22:56 below) I saw his death added to the article twice, once at 21:46 by editor "fixman" and then again at 21:48 by an anonymous editor.

Update: User Gort pointed out that I was looking at the talk page of the article revision history rather than the revision history itself. Easy mistake to make. Post updated and tail between my legs...

That's the talk page history, not the article history.

I'd like to jump in here. Hacker News and seomoz are the two websites I read the most consistently, and I've always found seomoz to be accurate, timely, and interesting. Although all their articles are generally well written, Danny's especially are always backed up by piles of data.

More generally, why is it that the mere mention of SEO brings distrust? I would expect this community to be keenly interested in SEO. Not only is the process itself fascinating, but I feel launching a start-up without a solid SEO strategy in place is at best irresponsible, at worst suicidal.

I feel launching a start-up without a solid SEO strategy in place is at best irresponsible, at worst suicidal.

I disagree (I'm in the SEO biz). In the long run, good content is more important -- and it's more of a long-term investment. However, SEO is the most cost-effective way to get a lot out of any given chunk of content.

People have a good reason to distrust SEO: when they encounter it and see it as SEO, it's pretty obnoxious. Most good SEO is hard to recognize as such, just as a good salesperson makes you feel like you made the decision yourself.

I agree that good content is also essential, but I think the idea that good content will naturally be found / attract links is a fallacy. Thus, launching without an SEO strategy is putting your business at a serious disadvantage, one that you may not be able to recover from, even if you have great content.

I really like your point about why people distrust SEO. I guess I have the separation between good and bad SEO, and care deeply about accessibility and usability, so its hard to remember that the bad SEO is what people usually notice and think of.

Glad to know there's other SEO's on HN :) Cheers!

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