Posted 14 February 2009 under the title “FACTS” with an embedded Vimeo player. Updated in 2026: that embed no longer plays (Flash is end-of-life, and the upload has since gone private). The video was “Did You Know?” — so this post now covers what it was and where to find it.
“Did You Know?” (originally titled “Shift Happens”) began in 2006 as a presentation Karl Fisch put together for a high-school faculty meeting about globalisation and the pace of technological change. Scott McLeod helped it spread, the design studio XPLANE gave it a proper visual overhaul as “Did You Know? 2.0” in 2007, and by 2009 — when this post went up — remixed versions with updated statistics were circulating everywhere.
The claims were the famous ones: China would soon be the number-one English-speaking country, the top ten in-demand jobs of 2010 did not exist in 2004, a week’s worth of The New York Times contains more information than a person in the 18th century would encounter in a lifetime. Whether every number survived scrutiny is beside the point — the video crystallised how the late-2000s internet felt, and it was screened in countless classrooms, boardrooms and keynotes.
Want to watch it today? Individual Vimeo uploads come and go (the one embedded here went private), but YouTube has stable copies, including the official Did You Know? 2.0 and the 2018 remix with refreshed statistics.