The breaking news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death dominated the web yesterday (and today), causing spikes in traffic and overwhelming social networks such as Twitter and Facebook with bursts of information and updates from millions of users. In comparison, discussions of Jackson far exceeded those of the swine flu scare as well as the inauguration of President Obama.

Nielsen Buzzmetrics analysis shows that more than 16% of tweets over the past 24 hours reference Michael Jackson, and less than 2 percent of Tweets mention Farrah Fawcett and Iran.

A Topper of Charts …