At least 15,000 fans think he does, and they’ve signed a petition circulating around the Internet aimed at rewarding the King of Pop for his humanitarian efforts. AFP reports that the petition has an ambition goal of one million signatures.

Even if they manage to get that many supporters though, the petition’s still got a couple of problems. First of all, petitions can’t get anyone a nomination; the nominator has to be an official person designated by the Nobel Committee. Second, and more importantly, well…Jackson’s dead. Nobel Prize recipients can’t be nominated posthumously.

Oh well. We like the enthusiasm of these fans!

More than 15,000 people have signed an Internet petition calling for the late pop star Michael Jackson to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

Started by an American college student, the petition praises Jackson for his commitment to humanitarian causes and calls on the Norwegian Nobel Institute to name the singer as next year’s winner.

“We the Undersigned, believe Michael Jackson has given of himself completely and selflessly in a lifelong effort to help better global conditions for children, and all of humankind,” the petition said.

“Michael Jackson has undoubtedly earned the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize,” said the petition posted at www.petitionspot.com/petitions/mjnobelpeaceprize.

The Web petition has a stated goal of one million signatures and had more than 15,000 supporters on Tuesday.

(AFP)

Check out the results of a survey by researchers Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, who monitored a mass of blogs to gauge the feelings of the world wide web’s users. They found that a huge wave of sadness hit on June 25th, following news of the shocking Michael Jackson death. Not too surprising, given how much influence the King of Pop had on our culture.

From Reuters:

Is it possible to tell how happy we all are?Yes, according to U.S. scientists who have devised a way to measure the happiness of millions of bloggers — and found Michael Jackson’s death was one of the saddest days while the U.S. election was the happiest in four years.

Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist from the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, have created a “sensor” to mine 2.3 million blogs and gather sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” Each sentence is then given a happiness score from 1 to 9 depending on a point system allocated to 1,034 words. For example, “triumphant” averages 8.87 points, “paradise” 8.72, “pancakes” 6.08, and “suicide” 1.25.

They said this “hedonometer” showed that the U.S. election day last November was the happiest day in four years with a spike in the word “proud” while the day of the “King of Pop’s” death was one of the unhappiest.

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, his fans mourned — and cybercriminals swung into action.

Within 38 hours, they forged alliances with familiar partners to trigger global spam campaigns that capitalized on the singer’s death.

That was a potent reminder of the dangers that computer-savvy lawbreakers pose in a world that increasingly depends on the Internet for communications and commerce.

If you received unsolicited emails about Jackson’s death, or if you clicked on suspicious links or pop-ups, your sensitive information may be at risk.  Be smart when you’re surfing the net! Read the specific details of their spam campaigns:

By dawn on Saturday, a top botnet gang, Waledac, had a client: a well-known online drug retailer, GlavMed.com, also known as Canadian Pharmacy, Cisco senior researcher Henry Stern says.

The Waledac gang began deploying thousands of bots to spam out millions of e-mails with Web links purportedly leading to news about Jackson, he says. But the links actually redirected recipients to websites affiliated with GlavMed that sold sexual-performance drugs and pain killers.

A few hours later, another major botnet gang, known as Rustock, also blasted out Jackson-themed spam for GlavMed’s online shopping sites.

“Rustock is run by a different group of criminals, but here it was spamming the same e-mails as Waledac on behalf of a common client,” Peterson says.

A week after Jackson’s death, criminals out to steal sensitive data or hijack online financial accounts began to move in. A major botnet gang called Pushdo launched a large-scale spamming campaign with enticing messages including: “Who killed Michael Jackson? Visit X-Files to see the answer.” A Web link followed.

Clicking on it triggered what’s known as a “drive-by download.” The attacking bot scans for security holes in popular applications such as Internet Explorer, QuickTime and Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Even in death, the King of Pop continues to shatter long-standing records.

As the news was  confirmed about Michael Jackson’s death, the internet was flooded by Google searches and music uploads/downloads. This article has the numbers.