Moment Garden – Sites celebrating your new baby’s birth and first years in life aren’t a digital novelty. Excited parents and 1st time parents-to-be can make use of an abundance of baby related resources online that combine photos, videos, family newsletters and invitations.

Moment Garden is playing in the same overall baby celebration field, only in national rather than little league. According to the website’s About,  Moment Garden is about collecting, documenting and sharing special moments with loved ones, capturing that “something you can re-live everyday. Something that celebrates your child’s life and keeps your family and friends updated of everything that’s happening.

How does Moment Garden compare to the other baby-childhood visual documenters out there? Decide for yourself.

Nikon’s This Day – This site could best be described as a “web content page that shows what happened on that day in the past, at some place in the world.” So if for instance, today’s date is December 19, 2010, This Day displays an important past event that took place on that date sometime in the past decades or centuries. Each entry is accompanied by an HD image, and the background music will make you feel as if you’re strolling around a futuristic yet peaceful museum.

Explore Nikon’s This Day and learn a bit of history along the way. Below is the entry for Dec 19, 1851, which marked the death of a famous English painter. Guess who?

Historvius – Some travelers strive to be the antithesis to traditional tourists, seeking rarely visited, off the beaten path sites around the world, avoiding famous sites and the crowds at all costs. But that doesn’t mean famous sites have become overrated. On the contrary, international tourist sites such as Egypt’s pyramids or the huge man-shaped statues of Easter Island are still on my to-visit list, and the fact that many people flock these places each year is not about to deter me from doing so.

Historvius is a wonderful information place on mainstream (and less known) tourist sites worldwide, offering a super cool platform for learning more on your next sought-after site (note that you won’t be able to find info on cities per se, rather only on attraction sites). Start your site search by selecting your vacation destination, or choose a time period you are interested in as a filter, or, if yo wish, search by historical figure. There is also an open search for those interested. I had a specific site in mind I wanted to learn more about when I gave Historvius a try, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The photo below is a hint. Click it to get to the site’s page.

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine – I wonder what the Web looked like 5 years ago. Can you even remember? If you try to by memory, prepare yourself for futility; technological advancements of the Internet happened and still occur today so fast and seamlessly, the entire Web feels like an organic creature that is growing before our very eyes.

Thankfully we have the Wayback Machine, an archive project by archive.org, which lets you see what web pages looked like, beginning from 1996 and up until a few months ago. Although the most interesting websites are conveniently blocked (try looking up Facebook or Twitter for example), or only partially represented in the archive, here are two fun examples:

allmyfaves.com. December 2006:

CNN.com, Feb 2003:

Looks funny, doesn’t it? Let the fun linger on with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Give it a try yourself and look for the old pages of your favorite website. Simply type in the url in the search box and hit the “Take Me Back” button. Let the magic begin…

Strange Maps – Created by the map connoisseur Frank Jacobs, the Strange Maps blog has been around since 2006. Frank “collects and comments on all kinds of intriguing maps—real, fictional, and what-if ones,” transforming the world of maps from a dry information tool to serving as an insightful and intriguing source of information and ideas.

Strange Maps is the Weekly Blogs winner, which is why it was included in last week’s Weekly Fave lineup. Visiting the Big Think’s blog will make you think entirely different on what maps are and how people use them to convey messages and meanings. Start with the fascinating post on “Planet Berlin” (click on the photo below) and you will start looking differently at maps.

Mural Locator – Helping users locating beautiful murals worldwide, Mural Locator focuses on the entire gamut of wall paintings, including both classics and contemporary wall art of urban environments. Seeking to share murals with us and help to archive the history and importance of murals, Mural Locator is on a mission that has aesthetic, historical and cultural values, and we salute to that.

Here is a special mural that caught my eye. Can you guess where it is located?

YTTM.tv – Go back in time with YTTM.tv, a huge video-based time capsule offering great historic and entertaining videos of various themes (video games, television, commercials, current events, sports, movies and music). Play with the year bar on top to see videos representing crucial and interesting moments in a specific year -as early as 1870!

To see an example of what I mean, see the video below by the film pioneer brother Louis Lumières , shooting the street on Broadway and Union Square, New York in 1896. Oh, and if you have an interesting video you think should be included in YTTM’s colossal collection, click the Add A Video button and pay your tribute to history.

CriticalPast – Forget about the History Channel; now you can tap into more than 57,000 videos of historical videos depicting important, influential and compelling moments in history, available for free viewing online. CriticalPast is “one of the world’s largest collections of royalty-free archival stock footage.”

Aside from the obvious educational value CriticalPast possesses, the amazing footage you can explore on this site is simply phenomenal. Superb content along with a slick, easy to use interface make CriticalPast a must stop if you have some spare time in your daily routine. Browse the videos by decade, country, or simply type in a keyword into the site’s search box. See the video below of a German sailor dancing with a girl outside a house in Europe in 1913.

IdiomDictionary – This fun and handy tool offers the identification, explanation and etymological description of over 5000 idioms found in the English language. Simply type in any word and you’ll be presented with a list of related idioms. Clicking on any of these will propmt a clean page giving a short definition of the idiom, its use in a sentence and a brief etymological explanation (origin history of the word or phrase).

Look at the screen shot below of my search for an idiom many of us can identify with at this time of year: Dog Days.