Placehold.it is a nice, simple idea for adding placeholder images to your website. Like this.

Excellent find via swissmiss.

The Archivist has been around for a little while, but if you haven’t used it yet, then here’s a quick example of how it works. The Archivist is, essentially, a tool to provide rapid analysis of Twitter activity against a given search term. For example, against the hash tag #zombies.

It overcomes a little of the drawbacks of Twitter search in that it maintains an archive (naturally) of the search term beyond the 7-day-ish horizon of Twitter search.

Kicking it off is as simple as bashing in the search term to the box shown above and clicking start analysis. Then you sit back and wait for the analysis to occur. The service is ‘elastic’ which means it needs a fangled explanation of how it works, but essentially the service will begin building up an archive from this point on.

If you log in with Twitter credentials then you can save the archive and return to it later. Logging back in, you’ll probably see something like this.

Here we can see two different archives I kicked off in mid-July. I became slightly concerned after hearing Jer Thorp’s talk at Thinking Digital that he used an Arduino kit connected to Twitter to warn him about impending alien invasion that I thought I’d set up a similar intelligence system.

Oddly, there are a lot of people tweeting about Aliens and Zombies, though from the volumes it seems like a zombie attack is more likely. We can then drill into a given archive, which gives a lot of simple information such as: top words in the search term, top users, and top urls.

Which we can then further drill into. Here we can have a look at the top #zombies tweeters.

Where we could explore a little more if we wanted to.

Finally, you can download the archive as a Zip, or view in Excel so you can take the data away and perform your own analysis. You can also compare two different archives. Here we can see #aliens compared to #zombies and frankly that spike at the end of July is a bit of a worry.

So it’s a useful tool as a bit of fun, or more likely as a simple way to analyze and retain tweets for an event or ongoing hash tag meme. Just don’t forget to set up the archive BEFORE the event starts!

I’ve no idea how to squeeze in play time these days (I’m struggling on the second bit of Lego Harry Potter…), which is a shame as there are so many great games available like Settlers of Catan on the XBox (I’ve always wanted to beat Martin Fowler at it…) or even on Surface.

Last time I played Age of Empires 2 (not the most recent version, but the best I reckon) was in the early days of broadband with the little blue Alcatel squid thing as an ADSL router which would tend to drop connection frequently (typically when my laptop decided to power down the USB port randomly).

This being strategy, it was no surprise that my strategically minded colleague, Gareth, who was ‘Head of Strategy’ (I think) thus proving those credentials tended to be victorious. My main recollection is building a fantastic city, smart, flexible army, and then being stomped all over the park by War Elephants.

Anyway, this announcement that AoE is going all MMORPG-y means I’ll dust off the “battle mouse” one more time…

I checked my calendar, but apparently it’s not April 1st, so I guess this article must be real.

In it that popular defender of privacy, er, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google talks of his worry about information casually being strewn around the internet by a generation of people don’t understand the consequences. He talks, of course, about the individual consequences but I suspect he’s probably thinking about the possible consequences for Google as Facebook seeks to capture the crown of browser home page, and becomes a much more interesting way of accessing the internet than the Google box.

He says "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time. I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."

Very noble of him, though as is pointed out by later in the article by Chris Williams of The Register who says "Recording everything and making it knowable by everyone all the time is Google's stated mission, and it is profiting handsomely from the fact that society doesn't understand the consequences."

I guess these things are worrisome for Google. Despite everything, it’s a one-trick pony and success is predicated on it being front of mind. In the world of smartphones and Facebook, search takes an important role, but it’s not in the driving seat. Regardless, I would have thought that those brainiacs at the ‘plex could come up with something better than a bit of FUD directed at Facebook.

On the wider issue at hand, it is true that we all need to get smart about what we post online – Cory Doctorow said it best when he talked about the half life of data on the web being very large indeed – but I prefer that I’d rather have that control over my identity even if it gets embarrassing than leave it to one organisation to photograph my house, draw its own conclusions on who I am and then index me as it chooses.

(I’m guessing that this piece of internet data probably means I’ll never get that job at Google. Hey ho.)

Nice infographic from DataViz

Talking of IE you can get your hands on the 2nd preview from the IE9 team here. You’ll probably remember that we announced we’d be pushing out regular previews throughout the development.

Once again, it’s not really a usable browser, but there are a host of new demos and progress to have a look at. The IE blog describes some of this stuff here.

One of the main bits of news here is that IE9 is hitting 68/100 on the Acid3 test.

If you’re itching to try out some of the web tech discussed at UK TechDays the other week, then I’m delighted to tell you that our buddies at Fasthosts and its Partners are giving away a Windows virtual dedicated server FREE for 1 year (no obligations) to the first 100 attendees that apply.

To apply, you need to give them a call on 0844 583 0788 and quote the reference code UKTECHDAYS. This offer is limited to 1 virtual private server per attendee.

The virtual private server specs are:

• Free .co.uk domain name
• 1GB Memory
• 80GB Data Storage
• 1 vCPU
• Unlimited Data Transfer
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition

These fast virtual private servers are available to you today, completely free for 12 months with no obligation or contract.

As you can imagine, you need to give them a call quick as this offer is available for a limited time and while stock lasts. (I’ve always wanted to say that!)

• Executive Summary
• Introduction
• Where we came from
• Why Windows?
• Why PHP over .NET
• Web Server Choices
• Deploying and Managing PHP
• Microsoft Web Platform Installer
• Beyond the Install
• Conclusion