nytimes-readersNick Bilton has posted a pair of videos showing the website traffic of NYTimes.com on June 25, 2009 (The day that Micheal Jackson died).  The videos show incoming website visitors as growing circles, yellow are desktop users and orange are mobile users.  One video focuses on the US, while the other shows the entire world.

Just watching these maps glow can be a mesmerizing experience, but there’s another fascinating piece of data within this particular day. At about 1 minutes 10 seconds into the video, at 5:20 p.m., you can see a huge pulse of readers coming to the Web site, both from mobile devices and personal computers. This huge traffic bump happened after TMZ.com broke the news of Mr. Jackson’s death. As the news started to filter across the Internet, traffic continued to ebb and flow throughout the evening.

via A Day in the Life of NYTimes.com – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.