February 2, 2004

Nationmaster - fascinating website

Click on over to Nationmaster and play around for a while - don't plan on getting anything else done today... This site is hard to describe so I will let it's creator, Luke Metcalfe, say why he wrote it: bq. The idea for NationMaster arose as I was surfing around the CIA World Factbook. It's a great read but I felt the individual figures (like number of TV's, or kilometres of coastline) didn't mean much on their own. They'd be more illuminating if they were placed alongside other countries and shown relative to population. bq. So I decided to put together a website that allowed users to generate graphs based on numerical data extracted from the Factbook. The next (rather obvious) realisation was that there's no reason I couldn't take in data from other sources. Why shouldn't the net have a central location that allows you to compare countries on any statistic you like? bq. But why did I do it? To promote education and understanding about the world. To make it easy to engage with the indicators that shape global commerce, health, politics and ecology. To make the facts easily accessible and meaningful. To bring the works of academics, public agencies and private researchers to a wider audience. Here are some sample searches: Most murders per captia (here) Population growth rates (here) Number of Televisions per capita (here) Fascinating stuff... Posted by DaveH at February 2, 2004 1:06 PM