Blue Rubicon's digital inspiration for January

And here it is - feel free to drop us a line if you want to find out more about any of it.

Slides - Jan 2011

Inside stats on a Sarah Palin viral sensation

My colleague on Blue Rubicon's digital team Karin Robinson also writes the excellent Obama London blog.

On Sunday night she found herself at the centre of a viral sensation when she spotted that Sarah Palin's Facebook page moderators were deleting anti-Palin comments, but not a comment that implied that it had been right to kill a 9 year old girl.

The post rapidly circulated on Twitter - from where the Huffington Post picked it up. It rapidly became the most re-tweeted item globally, generating over 400,000 views of her post in the following two days, and over 9,000 comments on Facebook, as well as extensive pick up in traditional media.

Karin's given a brief explanation of what happened on the Blue Rubicon website. But she's also kindly given me the Google Analytics for her blog in the last few days, which I've put below.

This is a good example of the value of building websites on platforms such as Blogger. Most hosting services would not be able to cope with such a huge surge of traffic, while, as far as I'm aware, Blogger didn't wobble once.

Karin Robinson Blue Rubicon Digital viral success

What would World War I blogs have read like?

My great-uncle has recently written up his father's letters, written while fighting in World War I in Iraq.

The interesting thing for me is quite how factual, dry and stiff-upper lip they are. After describing his injury and subsequent carriage to a hospital, he signs off, as if nothing terribly serious has happened.

My great uncle has added a note below the letter, describing what really happened:

My father doesn't mention the blood loss, pain, being left for dead among the dead, building a coffin of mud around him for protection and the rain filling this coffin with bloody water, twice falling off the stretcher, or the unsprung cart that transported his wounded body to the river Tigris.

I wonder how it would have been written if it was in 2011?