A picture is worth a thousand words, or at least can graph the impact of 2,845 tweets since my last roundup on 15 December last year.
Basically my Tom Baker tweet of five weeks ago has broken all records, with 1,074 retweets and perhaps over 600,000 impressions directly, plus an unknown number (maybe 20% more, maybe 40%) who picked it up and modified it.
#fb Tom Baker's answer when asked about his favourite memory of #DoctorWho

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) November 14, 2013
As I said at the time, my only regret was not giving more prominence to the source. It's difficult to imagine that I will equal that level of virality again any time soon.
Up till then, my most retweeted tweet of all time was this one, a mere 92 retweets which still eclipsed my previous record of 33:
Dalek Found At Bottom Of British Pond, Probably Just Biding Its Time http://t.co/rAOvats1JJ Be afraid. Be very afraid.
— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) May 23, 2013
Not quite so many retweets for this one a couple of weeks later (86 rather than 92), but slightly better eyeball numbers (about 100,000 rather than 40,000, thanks largely to Charles Stross and Nick Harkaway) for a tribute to a favourite author:
Iain Banks quotes http://t.co/dQLmUAAKFL Too many good lines here to single any one out.
— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) June 10, 2013
The Tom Baker tweet got 43 direct replies, which is another record. Two other tweets managed 7, one a completely inaccurate prediction about the Mid Ulster by-election, and one where the replies may look like an irrelevant trolling of a Foursquare checkin with commentary about Somali politics, but it's actually a fair cop as I was at the cafe for a public meeting about Somali politics. Seven was also the previous year's record.
I am up from 1,296 followers on 15 December last year to 1,625 today.
How is it even possible for stuff like this to go missing seeing as they are mostly preserved for posterity.
Sometimes bad things happen to the building they’re stored in. Many (about 60%) of the records pertaining to ordinary British soldiers during WW1 were destroyed or irretrievably damaged during WW2: they were stored in a building owned by the War Office that got hit by an incendiary bomb in 1940. The surviving documents and fragments were subsequently transferred to microfilm and are now housed at the National Archives in Kew, where they’re designated WO363 (but commonly referred to as “the burnt documents”). There’s an example here (the call-up papers for one of my great uncles) where you can see how badly singed even the surviving files got.