I’m betting it is. Jackson was a global icon and his funeral will purportedly be a star-studded affair. But I just don’t think this will compare to the two events that have already tested the Web’s capacity this year alone: Barack Obama’s inauguration and news of Jackson’s death.

Recall that Obama’s first speech as president managed to get most people to stop using Google (GOOG)–voluntarily. And Jackson’s death was a news event that pretty much everyone wanted to hear more about, at least for a couple seconds.

But on the Web at least, Jackson was old news by last week. And my hunch is that anyone who truly wants to watch today’s event will do so on a TV.

But if do you want to watch it on your laptop, try one of these outlets:

TMZ (of course)

CNN.com (partnering with Facebook again, a la the Obama event).

E! Online

ABC News

Fox News

Hulu

MySpace

CBS News

Want to watch in the company of others? Cinedigm will be screening the event, for free, at the theater chain’s screens in 31 states. Details here.

Some sites, like Discovery’s Planet Green, have already been playing around with the new OPA ads, but if you haven’t seen them yet, you can do it with a little bit of imagination. Think of a traditional Web ad as the equivalent of a yard sign. The new ones are billboards.

Like your descriptions more literal? Here’s the technical description of the new formats. By way of comparison, the column of text you’re reading now is 350 pixels wide.

The Fixed Panel: 336 wide x 700 tall, remains constant as the user scrolls to the top and bottom of the page.
The XXL Box: 468 wide x 648 tall, opens for seven seconds to 936 wide x 648 tall with 1/24x frequency.
The Pushdown: 970 wide x 418 tall, opens to display the advertisement and then after seven seconds, rolls up to 970 wide x 66 tall, with 1/24x frequency.

And um, here’s what a really big ad might look like on your desktop (click to enlarge).

If you’re knee-deep in the online advertising business, you’ll be interested in why these ad formats are being pushed by the Online Publishers Association instead of the better-known Interactive Advertising Bureau. I have heard some baroque/petty descriptions of squabbling between the two groups, whose membership overlaps but isn’t identical. But maybe we’ll come back to that some other time.

For now, let’s see if these deliver as advertised–that is, whether they get marketers to spend more money on the Web, without just plowing the money into Google (GOOG).

For those of you who don’t watch CNN or visit CNN.com with any frequency, iReport is the news service’s attempt to create its own user-generated news hub. It’s supposed be to be able attract eyeballs on its own and in some cases, feed the Web site and the cable channel with free content donated by viewers.

To date, iReport is best known as the place where someone posted a bogus item about Apple (AAPL) CEO  Steve Jobs. But CNN says it has been using the site heavily to augment its Iran coverage. From a press release it sent out earlier this week: “Since last week, we’ve received 4555 iReport submissions related to Iran–including more than 1600 this past Saturday and Sunday alone, and an additional 689 just yesterday. To date, 150 of the Iran-related iReports have been vetted and verified by CNN producers for use on CNN air or online–something the likes of YouTube or Flickr just aren’t equipped to do given their lack of newsgathering infrastructure.” (Yesterday CNN told me it added another 399 Iran-related iReports, and that seven had made it onto air. Presumably those numbers are still increasing.)

The breast-beating seems a bit much given that CNN, like every other cable network, has been happy to play up any bit of social media it uses in its Iran reporting. But the point about the vetting and verification is interesting.

I checked with CNN rep Jennifer Martin, who spelled out what that means: That CNN producers have contacted the people who sent in all of the Iran-related iReports it has featured on the network and at least verified that they are who they say they are. That in itself seems worthwhile, and maybe even worth bragging about.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV has more, including an interview with CNN.com producer Lila King.

Here’s an example of some the “verified” footage the network has used so far. For some reason the play/pause/etc. controls don’t show up on these embedded videos, but I’ve been able to get them to start and stop by clicking on the image:

Iranians shouting “Allah O Akbar” at night:

A pro-Mousavi rally:

While earlier reports suggested that the Web video audience might have rivaled that of television’s, the Web tracking service says the numbers were more modest. It figures that 13 million people watched video coverage of the inauguration between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Jan. 20. Nielsen numbers indicated that 38 million people watched the event on TV between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Click on table below to enlarge:

Those numbers still aren’t apples to apples, but they’re closer than the earlier numbers we had, which compared TV viewers to video streams–at least 70 million throughout that day. Last week, I theorized that the video stream numbers we’d seen were inflated because many people had to reload their browsers or switch from site to site when they ran into tech trouble. Looks like that may have been the case.

Still, comScore’s numbers show that the event was indeed a big day for Web video, and in particular for the cable networks that streamed coverage on their own sites: 30 percent of online viewers watched the events on a cable news site comScore says. That goosed numbers for Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN.com, News Corp.’s (NWS) Foxnews.com, and MSNBC.com, which is co-owned by GE (GE) and Microsoft (MSFT). (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

Credit NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes for trying to get her arms around the size of the audience that watched Tuesday’s proceeding on the Web. She was able to tally 70 million views, and notes that U.S. TV outlets totaled about 37.8 million viewers.

So was the Web audience watching Obama twice as big as the TV one? Who knows?

That’s because as impressive as those numbers are, it’s unclear what they actually mean. Gannes herself notes that her data are weighed down with several asterisks.

For one thing, she doesn’t have numbers from sources like the New York Times (NYT), which says its Web site served up a record number of views but won’t actually say how many that means. On the flip side, the video numbers she does have come from throughout the day, while TV numbers only cover 11 a.m. through 2 p.m. EST. Etc.

But the biggest issue here is that it’s impossible to equate a Web video view with a television viewer. If you had to reload your Web browser because the video you were watching crashed or stalled, you generated an extra Web video view. Every time you did that. Same thing applies if you switched to a different site to watch its feed.

So given the well-documented troubles most Web sites had serving up video on Tuesday, it’s entirely possible that each Web user generated more than one video view. Say, a couple on Time Warner’s (TWX) CNN.com, and then a few more at GE’s (GE) MSNBC.com.

Which means the real question is: How many video views did the average viewer account for?

The Web sites that have reported traffic numbers could clear this up by explaining how many individual IP addresses they served during the inauguration. But for whatever reason, they’re not.

So we’re back to guesswork when it comes to figuring out the size of Tuesday’s Web audience. Ironic, given that the Web is supposed to offer a precision that old media just can’t match when it comes to this stuff. Maybe one day.

Breaking things down a bit further, Beet.TV reports that MSNBC.com received over 20 million unique visitors, nearly 250 million page views, and served up some nine million video streams yesterday. Meanwhile, CNN.com counted 27 million unique visitors during election day and 4.9 million live video streams–the most in its history.

Must have been that new holodeck that gave CNN the edge, eh?

Breaking things down a bit further, Beet.TV reports that MSNBC.com received over 20 million unique visitors, nearly 250 million page views, and served up some nine million video streams yesterday. Meanwhile, CNN.com counted 27 million unique visitors during election day and 4.9 million live video streams–the most in its history.

Must have been that new holodeck that gave CNN the edge, eh?

One welcome sign is an effort by companies trying to improve Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile operating system, which has a reputation for confusing navigation and hasn’t had a major update recently. Kinoma Inc., for example, recently released an application called Kinoma Play that runs on Windows Mobile devices and gives users a markedly better way of handling photos, videos, music and Web browsing.

The HTC Touch Diamond, due out this month from Sprint, tries to hide Windows Mobile software.

This week, I tried yet another software program that is designed to run on top of Windows Mobile software. But this time, the software is at the heart of a device designed by the same company: HTC Inc. I tested the HTC Touch Diamond, due out from Sprint (S) sometime this month for $250 (after a $100 mail-in rebate) with a two-year contract.

Taiwan-based HTC started out in 1998 as a maker and designer of mobile devices for other companies. A year ago, HTC launched the first device under its own name in the U.S., and now, Sprint, AT&T (T) and T-Mobile (DT) sell HTC-branded devices. The Diamond incorporates HTC software, as well as software from Sprint, MobiTV, TeleNav and others. But it isn’t a stretch to imagine HTC trying to create a fully end-to-end model (hardware and all software) in the future.

The Diamond has a touch screen, but it’s smaller than Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone — 2.8 versus 3.5 inches. This screen lacks the iPhone’s multitouch functionality, and its smaller size robs space used for touch gestures like flicking or scrolling with a finger. Yet like the iPhone, it relies solely on an on-screen keyboard for all text entries. Even with the Diamond’s stylus, the keyboard felt small and cramped. Using just your fingertips was next to impossible.

After using the Diamond for a week, I can say that despite its handsome TouchFLO 3D software and animated icons like photos that flip from one to the next with a flick of finger, this device failed to disguise the frustrating interface of Windows Mobile often enough for my taste.

It reminded me of the brown paper bag book covers my Dad helped me make for schoolbooks when I was a kid: They looked great on the outside, felt sturdy and clean and created a blank canvas for homemade doodles that were often more interesting to me than the books they covered. But my book covers couldn’t change what was underneath; pages of frustrating algebra were just a flip away.

HTC’s sleek software tries to hide Windows Mobile, but menus from the Microsoft operating system are constantly popping up. HTC’s email program, for example, is represented by an animated envelope icon that, when selected, cleverly flips twice before sliding an email message half-way out and giving you a three-line peek at what’s inside. If only reading and responding to email were half as entertaining. Selecting the animated envelope opens the old, cumbersome Windows Mobile email program.

Also, the touch capabilities of the Diamond’s screen didn’t work as well as they should. Finger flicks that should have scrolled through lists instead seemed to select individual items in a list, as if they were sticky.

The Diamond isn’t all bad, of course. Plenty of people will like its smaller size because the iPhone and RIM’s (RIM) BlackBerrys seem too large and brick-like to hold up to an ear for phone calls. Next to my BlackBerry Curve, the Diamond was of comparable thickness but measured smaller in width and length.

Despite its size, the Diamond is packed with features. It has a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus that doubles as a camcorder, and comes with four gigabytes of internal memory and a removable battery. I taped short videos — something the iPhone can’t do — and found the sound and video footage to be adequate.

HTC touts the Diamond’s browser, which is based on the Opera browsing engine but is designed for HTC. It opens Web pages in views that fit the screen and text is automatically resized as users zoom in or out, though this resizing was sometimes slow.

Unlike the iPhone, Web sites that are opened on the Diamond’s browser don’t resemble the actual site as you would see it on your computer. I opened CNN.com (TWX) and WSJ.com (NWS), two sites that are packed with text and graphics on a regular browser. On the Diamond, they quickly were rendered in list format with mostly text-only. I easily touched the screen to follow links to full stories.

Like the iPhone, the Diamond has an accelerometer, though it’s called the “G-Sensor.” When it worked, this feature flipped the screen to match the horizontal or vertical direction in which the device was being held. Photos flipped instantly, but the Diamond’s G-Sensor took almost three full seconds to respond as I flipped from vertical to horizontal while using the browser. And some Web sites didn’t respond to the G-Sensor flips at all.

A special YouTube application developed by HTC was easy to find on the device and worked quickly. My videos were organized into categories for All, History, Bookmarks and Search, though this last category required using the finger-fumbling keyboard. In one step, I emailed a link from a YouTube video to a friend using the device, with a still shot from the video included in the message.

Overall navigation on the Diamond isn’t as intuitive as on the iPhone or iPod Touch, nor was it as easy as on a touch-screen Windows Mobile device running the Kinoma Play application. The iPhone and iPod Touch use quick double-taps on touch screens to zoom in or out, and multitouch capabilities resize images with pinching gestures; Kinoma Play uses a long touch to zoom in. The Diamond used double tapping on some screens, but not enough for me to grow comfortably reliant on it. A small, circular pad beneath the device’s touch screen provided a more dependable method for zooming in or out of screens: tracing the perimeter of this circle clockwise with a finger zoomed in; counterclockwise zoomed out.

The HTC’s software animation is put to good use on its Weather screen. Here, animated illustrations of each day’s weather appear on the screen: suns spin, clouds move in, rain appears to fall. Even moons appear on the device at night to accurately reflect the weather in a city at a specific time.

It is exciting to think about other mobile-phone companies giving better software a real try, especially those that attempt to improve Windows Mobile. But HTC’s Touch Diamond doesn’t hide the outdated operating system well enough or often enough for a user to want to buy a whole new mobile device.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com