A tragedy spun out on the Web

The Internet never sleeps, and America and Australia were awake when the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was announced. So while Britons were rubbing the sleep and disbelief out of their eyes on Sunday morning, by 8.30am one Australian had already commented on Usenet that "everyone knows about Di's death by now".

But it took Buckingham Palace another hour before, at 9.30am on Sunday, it rejigged its Web page (at http://www.royal.gov.uk/) to include the news. The normal crest and picture of Buckingham Palace were replaced with a sombre black background and an image of a smiling Princess carrying a bouquet with the simple caption: "Diana, Princess of Wales, 1 July 1961 - 31 August 1997". The site was cut down from 165 pages to about 10, with an official (if brief and bowdlerised) biography, and a page on which users could pass their electronic condolences on to the Royal Family. Sometimes the pages, run by the Central Office of Information's server, took minutes to appear because the site was under such a blizzard of interest. The site, set up in May, was already one of the most popular on the Net, registering more than a million hits a week early on. On Sunday it was overwhelmed.

As were the fans of Diana, who were faster off the mark in setting up their Web pages with simple tributes. Dale and Susan Paget, in Santa Clara, California, who run the pages at http://www.royalnetwork.com, had put up a simple page of condolence by 11pm local time - two hours after the news of Diana's death broke. Other US sites, such as http://www.webstars.net, also offered tributes.

News sites such as that operated by CNN (http://www.cnn.com/) flourished, had comprehensive coverage of the accident, updating it within minutes through the day.

Usenet - the Net's thousands of discussions groups - was its usual mixture of mawkishness, tasteless humour, genuine sorrow and uninterested dismissal. Many expressed the belief that the paparazzi had gone too far. The ways in which the Princess had touched others' lives was visible by the places in which the discussions took place - alt.talk.royalty, alt.showbiz.gossip. alt.fashion and even bizarrely rec.arts.disney-parks. (After all, she took the Princes there.)

One thing became clear reading the attempts to express grief: Usenet is an insufficient place to mourn. The inherent limitations of what is effectively a one-way medium - you read messages and type a response, but you have to log off and on to see if anyone has answered - make it impossible to really share a sudden loss like this. You can agree that a death is sad endlessly; but in the end you are alone with your computer.

For some, it was just a car accident. "The driver was just going too fast for the conditions," said one bored American (in, of course, rec.auto.driving), insisting that it was not speed per se which was dangerous.

There was the inevitable conspiracy theorist. "Call me paranoid if you like," began one Irish poster, which then suggested that landmine manufacturers and the Royal Family were "none to [sic] happy with Diana interfering with affairs they'd rather like to be untouched by such a high profile figure".

The final lesson? One cynical poster suggested it was simply this: "Don't drive a Mercedes at high speed into a concrete tunnel. Much better to slow down and smile at the photographers"n