Today's memorial service for Michael Jackson is expected to be the biggest event in the history of the internet.

As media companies prepare to cover the service with live broadcasts on television and simultaneous streaming online, analysts are predicting that the enormous worldwide interest in the death of the King of Pop will lead to a surge in internet use, and could even crash some servers.

Adam Ostrow, Editor-in-Chief of the San Francisco-based Mashable online social media guide, said that he expected the service to be “the biggest event we’ve ever seen online”, and it would test the infrastructure of the internet and the websites broadcasting the service.

“It could just be the biggest thing ever in the history of the internet,” Mr Ostrow told The Times. “The memorial service is happening during normal hours in the US when people will be at work, which means people aren’t going to be in front of a TV, they are going to be at their computers and turning to the internet to watch the event.”

Since Jackson’s death almost two weeks ago, fans have been inundating social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace with comments, tributes and downloads, while searches for Jackson-related news have reached record levels on Google and Yahoo.

As Jackson’s family and close friends prepared to attend a private funeral at the Forest Lawn mortuary in the Hollywood Hills today, Facebook and MySpace announced that they would stream live footage of the public memorial service at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles.

About 1.6 million people applied to win 8,750 pairs of free tickets for the public memorial allocated via an online lottery over the weekend. Millions more are expected to watch it broadcast around the world.

A live feed of the service will be made available free to television networks, while Facebook users will be able to watch streaming video of the memorial courtesy of an alliance with CNN Live, and MySpace members will get a similar opportunity through a collaboration with the entertainment group AEG.

"The memorial will be streamed real-time, free, and people will be able to comment or link over to Michael Jackson's profile," said Sarah Joyce of MySpace Music. "We are picking up the stream and showing our support."

Facebook Connect, the technology which streamed CNN coverage of President Obama's inauguration, will allow users of the networking site to watch the Jackson memorial.

"Internet users across the globe can watch [the memorial] live while simultaneously updating their Facebook status and following their friends on Facebook, and other Jackson fans around the world," Facebook said.

Mr Ostrow predicted that the Jackson memorial could surpass Mr Obama’s inauguration as the most watched event of the year.

Jackson is already more popular than the US President on Facebook – the star’s page is now the most popular on the site, with the number of members now standing at 6,708,180, up from 80,00 before his death. Jackson’s page now has 300,000 more fans than Mr Obama's.

Within an hour of Jackson’s death on June 25, more than 30 per cent of Twitter was taken up with Jackson-related discussion, while the Yahoo and Google search engines recorded enormous traffic for Jackson-related searches. Even one of Jackson’s closest friends, Dame Elizabeth Taylor has tweeted about him, using the service yesterday to announce that she would not be attending Tuesday’s memorial.

As music stores around the world sold out of Jackson CDs and his songs re-entered the music charts, people rushed to source them from the internet, with 2.6 million downloads of his songs registered in the week after his death.

His videos also became some of the most-watched on YouTube, with almost 50 million people having viewed the 1984 video for Thriller.

One of the biggest winners of the post-Jackson death internet phenomenon is the US celebrity website TMZ.com, which broke the story of the singer’s death.

New figures released this week show that TMZ's traffic rose 70 per cent year on year, attracting 7.95 million visitors in the week that ended June 28 (three days after Jackson’s death), according to the tracking company comScore.

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