As news spread of Michael Jackson’s death millions of news hungry people turned to websites to confirm the verifiability of that story. And the Jeff Goldblum story too…but let’s not get into that. Several prominent sites crashed under the weight of so much sudden traffic, leaving many in agonizing confusion. Increasingly, governments at all levels are now looking to use distributed databases linked in through secure servers not only to educate the public but to sync essential services through an organized and accessible user friendly interface. Data.gov is emblematic of this new government love affair with the internet. So what happens when Michael Jackson syndrome hits in the form of a major disaster, a tsunami on the west coast, an asteroid, earthquake, alien invasion…how much faith can we place in our information infrastructure to deal with sudden massive spikes in activity, especially when crucial life or death information is needed? With 7.2 billion dollars in the recent American bailout package specified for broadband infrastructure improvement one would hope to rest assured. The only problem is that your distant rural cousins Cletus and Jedediah, somewhere deep in the Smokey Mountains are really the focus of this money as some critics complain. The crashes we saw recently weren’t coming from there, they were coming from us urban folks- tweeting like crazy and dying to known what Perez Hilton was saying. Give us more broadband space!

An example. As the economic recession hit its stride, state government servers failed as countless unemployed were directed to government sites to apply online for assistance or read through FAQs.

If National, regional and municipal governments of the world continue to develop policies that incorporate the internet, whether for creation of information portals, use of social media in involving public in policy directions, as Obama is keen to do, or as a one stop shop for everything from unemployment to disaster management, they’d better create departments of web server maintenance. ‘Cause when the s–t goes down, the site better not. In Canada, our cabinet could now include a Minister of Internet Server Security. Or maybe yet, as I listen to my liberal economics angel on the other shoulder, we could leave it up to the market as they say. There are SEO and web hosting companies for this kind of thing right? In any event it’s time for governments to get serious about site management and server management if they intend to maximize the usability of the virtual bureaucracy now being programmed into existence. Data.gov is a laudable idea, but if unemployment and Michael Jackson are crashing websites around the country, it makes me question the faith I can put in .gov sites to cope with the imminent alien invasion that we the educated population know is coming.