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.

Super-share me

A Yin and Yang post.

The first because it made me laugh, (and cringe), because I do still see far too many "I want a viral" type requests, and anyone that knows me passably well, knows that   "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A VIRAL" is a soap box I will shout off ad infinitum. "A viral": Noun. No no no no no.  Interesting, relevant content can be transmitted virally (adverb) but that's it.  So bear this image in mind from a very from a fab collection of ad industry insightful mickey-takes.

 But, granted, given that the un-enlightened masses with limited knowledge of the parts of speech still insist on using "viral" as a term for good content that has resonated and found broad reach, here's a grab (find the interactive version here) from Unruly Media's Viral Spiral charting the increase in sharing and reach of the big, popular pieces of video content 2006 to 2010.

Having seen such rapid rise in broadband penetration over the last 4 years, and with it the pain removed from video streaming; and, the rise of social sharing platforms like Facebook and Twitter the growth in numbers is hardly surprising.  You can compare and contrast someone else's view of the big hitters of 2010 from a brand perspective here.  It's always useful to have these stakes in the ground to refer back to in what I was amused to see referred to as internet archaeology last week. Err, did you mean history?

So for my own internet / digital time capsule purposes alone, here's a look at the web in 2010 in numbers. No doubt I'll be tickling that one with a mouse, or gingerly touching a screen in a year or so, whilst digging for stats.