TECHNICK

Looks like I called this one wrong: Earlier in the day, I predicted that Web interest in Michael Jackson’s funeral/memorial would be less than expected, because anyone who really cared about this would be watching on TV.

Nope.

Check out these snapshots of Akamai’s (AKAM) live traffic meters, which I took shortly after 1pm et. They indicate that the Web infrastructure company’s clients are serving up more than 109 million customers per minute — more than they have at any other period this year, including Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Akamai doesn’t represent all of the Web, but since it’s by far the biggest content delivery network service, it’s a pretty darn good proxy. The previous record appears to have been 90.6 million, set last month during the Iranian elections (click to enlarge):

Meanwhile, I didn’t actually go ahead and write this, but my hunch was that any Web traffic we did see today might come from countries outside the US that either didn’t get a TV feed or who cared about Jackson much more than Americans did.

But Akamai’s visualization of traffic to news sites worldwide says I would have been wrong about that, too: Almost all of the traffic is being served up by American news sites, and traffic to sites around the world is down for this time of day.

But here’s the thing I still don’t get: All of this has been happening when there has been nothing to see. Here’s a representative screengrab of ABC’s live feed, which I took around 1:10 pm et.

OK. Have at it. I’ll be back later in day with whatever other traffic tidbits I can round up.