There’s a really cruel blog-meme going the rounds: list your favourite album for every year of your life. (Bonus points for those you actually own.) Where the hell do you find the data? Various sources, including Amazon.co.uk, have got the number one albums for every year, but the charts only go back to 1956, and few of my favourites ever made it to number one. Wikipedia to the rescue: they have information about every year from 1950 to 2008. So in principle I could use the following procedure: scan each year’s releases in Wikipedia and pick my favourite. Then go through my top hundred or so albums ((My iTunes library has 706 albums, but only about 60% of my collection has been ripped.)), check the release date, and decide whether it beats out the current choice for that year.
I’ll be getting back to you on this, when I’ve found a couple of hours to crank through the data!