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Thursday 7 February 2013

Digital Treasure Fantastic Finds

It's February. Already.

December and January vanished in a haze of 14 hour days, conference calls and Powerpoint, barely a glance at Facebook, Twitter left lying sadly neglected, barely a pause for Christmas celebrations.  My friends are having an awful lot of fun with the real and not so real answers to "what did I miss" question. I'm struggling to tell what might be real and did happen and what didn't.

Apparently there was a power cut during the superbowl last weekend. I hadn't even twigged it was on. CES... no idea what happened there... no doubt some bigger and smarter TV screens, but I didn't hear they had yet cracked a smartphone that can bring me a cup of tea in bed in the morning. It snowed... that I did note.

Twitter I miss so much during such periods of mad intensity that I can't indulge my curiosity with distraction.  But for all of that I have tripped over two things of digital awesomeness during the last week or so.

One is another genius Firefox plugin to add to my evangelism list (I already love love love love Fireshot)... and now my inner SEO nerd has uncovered.... SEOQuake.  Clutters my browser with amazing stats and has a really really simple diagnosis report for the headlines. Love it.

The other.... and this is the coolest thing I have found on the interweb in a really really long time... is the Internet WayBack Machine.... an archive of websites past and present.

Pop in your URL....and  out it pops with all the data points you can go back to to follow the evolution of a website overtime.... here's the BBC

Then, select your datapoint to get back to a WORKING, EXPLORABLE version of the site....

December 1996....

February 2003....

February 2007....

I am one ecstatic geek right now

I could play with this for hours and hours.  What an amazing archive resource. Truly digital treasure.