Sarah Palin and Michael Jackson Rank High Among IM, Twitter Users

Illustrating the link between social media and news distribution, Sarah Palin and Michael Jackson have both been on the minds of IM and Twitter users lately.

In the hours following news of Michael Jackson's death, AIM was clogged by IM users to the point of an unprecedented 40-minutes outage, not to mention over 100,000 tweets an hour--a staggering 30 percent of Twitter activity.

Meanwhile, following Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's July 3 resignation announcement, tweets spiked to just under 40,000 an hour, helping her maintain her reign as one of the top 50 trends on Twitter