I’m having some great fun this morning playing around with Google’s index from January 2001 (made available to celebrate Google’s 10th birthday). Results also link through to the Internet Archive so you can see what those sites looked like at around the same time.
Some fun queries:

site:wikipedia.com (they hadn’t moved to their .org home at that [...]

With all this talk of the sorry state of the U.S. and U.K. economies, it’s easy to forget about the good times.
Harvard Business has a great interactive chart showing economic cycles in the U.S. over the last 60 years.
If you step away from the screen, and squint a little, it looks exponential.

Click through to Harvard [...]

Yongfook is a crazy-awesome “web producer” (php nerd with social sense) and has just released Sweetcron, a simple way to aggregate your web activity on your own site.
I’m planning to play around with it for a while, and hopefully move all of my short-form stuff from other places on the web to my Sweetcron lifestream. [...]

It’s hard to read large amounts of text in a browser window. Columns end up being too wide, and the processes of scrolling tends to encourage skimming.
I’m trying to design a better way to present large amounts of plain text online. At the moment I’m experimenting with narrow columns and a strong page metaphor in [...]

A recent link on Hacker News pointed to research at Stanford establishing guidlines for Web Credibility.
I would recommend it to anybody who deals with communication, marketing or design of corporate websites.
Particularly interesting (to me) are those guidelines that deal solely with design, rather than content:
6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate [...]

Just had to reblog this - one of the coolest visualizations I’ve seen for a while:

2008 US Movie Box Office visualization by Zach Beane
(via swissmiss via GenPink)

The 2008 Beijing Olympics has just finished. So who did the best?
Well if you believe NBCOlympics, it’s the US with 110 medals.
But that’s absurd, right? China won almost everything, achieving 51 gold medals to just 36 by the States.
If we count a gold medal as three points, silver as two and bronze as one, we [...]

This one’s a bit of a usability design in-joke.
I’ve made a WordPress theme based on the site design of web usability expert Dr. Jakob Nielsen. For those who don’t know, Jakob’s success and committed following have shielded him from the last 10 or so years of developments in web design. His site is a time-machine [...]

As you can tell from the entirely un-sexy title, this is one for the analytics nerds.
Google Insights provides the interesting capability of viewing the relative search volume of keywords mapped to a geography. So for instance, Andrew Chen has used the tool to identify websites used by early adopters. This is handy both directly for [...]