by Ryan Hupfer
I believe that the time was nearing 6:00pm and I was slowly drifting into one of those “I’m bored, let’s see where the Internet takes me” sort of moods when I first noticed something odd that grabbed my attention. A few minutes of Twitter browsing, email checking and random link hopping resulted in me finding myself on the Alexa home page where one of the Movers and Shakers for the day had an oddly short and interesting domain name. In fact, it was one of the oddest looking domain names that I had ever seen – which, if you know me very well, says a lot.
The domain name was simply 0at.org and it’s traffic was up an amazing 10,000%. Not too shabby, eh?
Of course this instantly made me curious to find out why traffic was flowing to this seemingly unknown corner of the web like beer at a Mashable party, so I decided to go check it out for myself. After typing 0-a-t.org(yes, that’s a zero) and hitting Enter I was taken to a website/blog that was developed by a 25 year old web designer, developer, and online marketer named Matthew Inman. I then started looking around for what could be so freakin’ important that it made Alexa make such a big fuss.
Once I landed on the page it didn’t take me very long to figure out what was drawing everyone’s attention as a playful looking plane going down in flames instantly sucked in my cursor and prompted me to click. I practically had no choice in the matter. After clicking I was quickly redirected to what Matthew has coined The State of the Web: Summer 2008, which is a super-smart and creatively illustrated look into the major news of the Web over the past few months.
Some of the highlights are:
- - Twitter crashing and burning
- - Firefox 3′s world domination day
- - MySpace sucking harder than a black hole
- - Two girls and one cup’s disgusting viral success
As you can clearly see, none of these news stories that Matthew has highlighted are anything new to the Web world – in fact, most of them have been drilled into the ground for many months now. But, with the help of his insanely creative talents and his “damn I wish I could do that” design skills Matthew has seemed to create something that has everybody buzzing.
And my girlfriend wonders why I love the Internet so much, geez.
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Connect with me out on the Internets, yo.
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