Depending on your perspective, this is either interesting news or heartening news: Michael Jackson’s funeral and memorial were indeed a giant Internet event. But they don’t seem to have been as big as Michael Jackson’s death, and they weren’t as big as Barack Obama’s inauguration.

So let’s call them the third-biggest Web event of the year. To date.

That sounds more like what I was thinking this morning: Everyone had to watch Obama’s inauguration or read about Jackson’s death, but not everyone felt compelled to see his burial or memorial.

It also explains why the Akamai people were so uncomfortable with my earlier reading of their traffic stats this afternoon, when I concluded that the events were responsible for the content delivery service recording more visitors per minute than any other time in the last year. Though I’d still love it if someone could explain why that did happen. (Jennifer? Anyone?)

Statistics are tumbling in from different sites and services (if you’d like to share yours with me, I’m all  ears).

Here’s what I’ve got for now:

• Akamai (AKAM) says it delivered 2,185,000 “live and on-demand streams” today. If I’m comparing apples to apples here (Jennifer?), that’s much fewer than the seven million simultaneous streams the content delivery network delivered during Obama’s inauguration. Akamai also compares the number of visitors on its “Net Usage Index for News” and says that number peaked at 3,924,370–that’s nearly double average traffic of 2,000,000, but fewer than the 4,247,971 visitors who were looking for Jackson info when he died on June 25.
• Facebook, which integrated its service with live video feeds from CNN, E! ABC and MTV (why wasn’t Twitter doing this?), says that one million users posted 800,000 status updates during the event, with the overwhelming majority coming through CNN. There were 1.8 million updates with the word “Obama” in them during the inauguration.
• CNN says it served up 781,000 concurrent live streams during the event; during the Inauguration it served up 1.3 million. It served a total of 4.4 million streams during the event, and 10.4 million for the day.
• MSNBC claims three million live streams–which are different from concurrent streams–and says that is its second-highest total, after…well you can guess. More if they roll in.

We’ve already seen the requisite “Twitter is down” stories, but in my experience, the service seemed to hold up reasonably well, and certainly it performed exponentially better than it would have just a year ago when it was a fraction of its current size.

And after the first crush of users started to slow Twitter down, the service calmly went into triage mode, disabling the search bar on the homepage that few people use anyway. Later that evening things were back to normal.

This seems to have been the pattern across the Web: Sites and services struggled with the initial burst of traffic–roughly from 5:30 pm through 7:30 pm Eastern time–then regained their footing. I’m told that AOL’s AIM service, for instance, had an outage around 5:30 pm Eastern that was likely related to Jackson chatter, but it was back up again shortly after that.

Meanwhile, the BBC has tallied up other services that had slowdowns or outages:

• Google (GOOG)
• Time Warner’s TMZ (TWX), which broke the story
• Time Warner’s AOL, which put the TMZ story on its front page within a couple of minutes of its initial publication
• Time Warner’s CNN, which was much more cautious about the story, and only reported that Jackson had been hospitalized until non-TMZ sources confirmed the story
• Yahoo (YHOO)
• MSNBC

I assume the list is longer than that, so feel free to add others in comments below. But I spent a lot of time surfing to various sites yesterday evening and was struck by how well many of them held up.

The good/bad news: Media fragmentation means that Michael Jackson is likely the last global icon, so we’re unlikely to see a repeat of this. If you want to get really macabre, you can think up other events that might put the Web under strain all over the world, but that’s no fun.

This is, though:

[Image credit: Eccentric Scholar]

Because they can, of course. And because the presidency-to-be has already provided a short-term boost for media companies who’ve been able to feed the public’s appetite for all things Obama. The New York Times, for example, says it generated $2.3 million in much-needed extra revenue via the sale of its commemorative election day edition and other paraphernalia.

So it will be nearly impossible to boot up your browser on Tuesday and not end up watching a live stream of the pomp and circumstance; the actual swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for noon Eastern Standard Time.

But just in case your online venue of choice gets the hiccups, here’s a list of sites that promise to provide coverage; I’ve also embedded a stream from Hulu (which is using the Fox broadcast’s feed) at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer to stay right here.

I’m sure I’ve probably missed several dozen options: If you’ve got a site you want to add to the list, do so in comments below or contact me at peter@allthingsd.com or via the blind tip box here.

Presidential Inauguration Committee (Microsoft-haters beware: This stream will require the company’s Silverlight player)

Joint Congressional Committee

New York Times

Washington Post

ABC News

CNN (features obligatory Facebook tie-in)

C-SPAN

CBS News

MSNBC

Fox News

Joost (Joost would like to point out that unlike some of the options listed here, its feed will be available for  international audiences).

Current TV (features obligatory Twitter tie-in)

Livestation (requires download; player allows viewers to flip between coverage from Al Jazeera, C-Span, BBC, euronews, France 24, Russia Today).

One major video outlet that apparently won’t be streaming the event live: The biggest–Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. But YouTube’s Inauguration Channel is serving up plenty of video during the run-up.

And if you couldn’t score tickets to the Huffington Post’s pre-inaugural ball Monday night with the likes of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and, um, Ashton Kutcher, don’t fret: The news aggregator promises to provide both live video and live blogging of the event.

That, at least, is the theme of the grandly named “Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,” which kicks off today at Columbia Law School. The two-day event, organized by video start-up Howcast, is supposed help activists brainstorm ways to use Facebook and other social media to organize themselves and garner attention.

This is heady stuff, but there is some real-world grounding there: Organizers of a protest against FARC, the Columbian terrorists, credit Facebook with helping them rally millions of people against the group in February.

The man who organized that movement, Oscar Morales, will appear at the summit, and so will Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. I’m also interested to hear from members of the Obama campaign’s Internet team, who will appear Friday. And, um, so will I: I’m moderating a panel of media worthies, including MSNBC’s Luke Russert.

A full schedule is here, and if you can’t make the event in person, you should be able to tune in via Webcast at Howcast’s page.

[Image Credit: equinoXio]