Today is 9 April 2012, and by the end of the day we can reasonably expect 700 million people to know something about Eadweard Muybridge, the visionary 19th century photographer whose rapid action sequential images pointed the way to motion pictures. That’s the number of individuals estimated to visit Google every day, and today they would have come across the latest variant on the Google logo, or doodle, a grid of horses as photographed by Eadweard Muybridge, which animates into a succession of galloping horses. Of course, probably 90% of those individuals won’t both to click on the logo to make the animation run in an endless loop, and 90% of those who do won’t both to follow up the links to Muybridge sites that occur when you click on the logo again. But that still leaves seven million people who learned something about Muybridge today. Now doesn’t that make it sound like the world just became a marginally better place?

Of course, Google being Google, the list of links is a bit overwhelming for the newcomer, and most of the first two pages is given over to sites telling you that Google has just put Eadweard Muybridge on its front page, so that the whole thing becomes a bit of an endless loop in itself which doesn’t actually tell you much.

So, for the select few of you among the 700 million, here are some of the most useful Eadweard Muybridge links around. Do explore.

• The Compleat Muybridge – Stephen Herbert’s definitive bio-historical site
• Muy Blog – Herbert’s accompanying blog on Muybridge news
• Animal Locomotion – almost all of the plates from Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion (1887), courtesy of Boston Public Library
• Scientific Movement – an online exhibition by the Luminous Lint site on scientific sequence photography, of which Muybridge was a leading exponent
• Eadweard Muybridge – 100 photographic plate sequences animated by UCR/California Museum of Photography
• Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema – a handy one-page biography
• Eadweard Muybridge: Definities Modernities – educational site produced by Kingston Museum, home of the Muybridge personal collection
• Muybridge Collection – A guide to the Kingston Museum collection
• The running man – the Bioscope’s analysis of an iconic image sequence from Muybridge

Oh, by the way, happy 182nd birthday to Eadweard.