The funeral is characterized as a small private gathering, this person said.

The event comes two days after Mr. Jobs passed away after battling an undisclosed illness. He previously underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant.

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So says video views tracker TubeMogul, which illustrates its argument via a nifty interactive chart at the bottom of this post.

If you don’t like charts, here are some words: Unauthorized clips of Jackson’s July 7 funeral/memorial generated 16.6 million views on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube within 48 hours. But copies of newly unearthed footage from 1984, which shows Jackson’s hair going up in flames as he filmed a Pepsi commercial, are barely making a ripple, comparatively. Tubemogul says the clip generated fewer than 800,000 views in a 24-hour stretch.

Important distinction here: Tubemogul is tracking video views only. Anecdotally, there’s plenty of evidence that people are still interested in reading about Jackson online, especially as more and more lurid stories get out. But the YouTube audience, it seems, has moved on.

I feel a little funny about linking to or embedding the hair-fire clip. It has a sort of snuff-film quality to it, especially with the ghoulish music and commentary layered on by US Weekly, which says it has “exclusive” access to the video. But it’s easy enough to find if you want to gawk.

Here’s a more pleasant one:

Earlier this week, BoomTown pointed out how Cisco (CSCO) Chairman and CEO John Chambers was captured doing duck calls on the Flip digital video camera, made by the start-up his company bought in March for $590 million.

That was an adorable use of the consumer electronics device. But in the not-so-cute department, I submit this photo above.

Sitting next to her boss, Barbara Walters, an ABC producer used it to ghoulishly take shots of the kids of pop legend Michael Jackson memorial service on Monday.

Noted the TMZ celebrity news site:

“During last night’s ’20/20′ Michael Jackson special, Walters showcased footage shot by an ABC producer sitting next to her at the memorial. The video captures Katherine Jackson and Michael’s kids two rows in front of Barbara watching the service–despite the fact that tickets to the event clearly state ‘no camera/video/recording.’”

While readers of this blog know I am all for annoying execs with the Flip treatment, pointing and shooting at what is essentially a funeral service, given how much video was available already of those kids (already being sadly overexposed, but that’s another issue): Yuk.

Here is a link on the TMZ of the video in use by Walters.

[Photo courtesy of Getty Images.]

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.

Nope.

Check out these snapshots of Akamai’s live traffic meters, which I took shortly after 1 pm EDT. They indicate that the Web infrastructure company’s clients are serving up more than 109 million customers per minute–more than they have at any other period this year, including Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Akamai (AKAM) doesn’t represent all of the Web, but since it’s by far the biggest content delivery network service, it’s a pretty darn good proxy. The previous record appears to have been 90.6 million, set last month during the Iranian elections (click to enlarge):

UPDATE: The Akamai folks want me to note that this chart measures overall Web traffic, not just traffic to news sites, etc. Which means that there could be other factors pushing up traffic today — large software downloads, etc. And, for that matter, if you look at Akamai’s peak traffic days over the last year, you’ll note that they’ve increased nearly every month. So while we can say that Akamai’s was serving more Internet traffic at 1pm eastern time than it has at anytime in the last year, we can’t draw a straight line between that fact and the fact that Jackson event was happening at the same time. But I’m going to go ahead and draw a dotted line.

UPDATE 2: Now I see why the Akamai folks were so cautious. New stats indicate that the event was big on the Web, but not as big as the Obama inauguration.

Meanwhile, while I didn’t actually go ahead and write this, my hunch was that any Web traffic we did see today might come from countries outside the U.S. that either didn’t get a TV feed or that cared about Jackson much more than Americans did.

But Akamai’s visualization of traffic to news sites world-wide says I would have been wrong about that, too: Almost all of the traffic is being served up by American news sites, and traffic to sites around the world is down for this time of day.

But here’s the thing I still don’t get: All of this has been happening when there has been nothing to see. Here’s a representative screen grab of ABC’s live feed, which I took around 1:10 pm Eastern Time.

OK. Have at it. I’ll be back later in day with whatever other traffic tidbits I can round up.

His funeral is today at 10:30 a.m. at Saint Raymond Catholic Church in Menlo Park.

A “Friends of Mike Homer” Facebook group page has also been created, with lots of great memories posted on its wall.

In 2007, Homer (pictured here with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen) was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

A rare, neurodegenerative “prion” disease, which in Homer’s case occurred sporadically rather than via infection (the well-known variant that occurs in animals is called mad cow disease), CJD’s incidence is one case in a million annually, and few survive beyond a year after exhibiting symptoms.

There is no known cure for CJD, and treatments have been few. That might change, given the push that Homer, his family and friends had been making to accelerate the pace of discovery for treatments and a cure by raising many millions of dollars for the cause and pushing for even more aggressive development.

Here is the obituary that the Homer family wrote:

Michael (Mike) J. Homer: February 24, 1958-February 1, 2009

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation at www.cjdfoundation.org.