There is no escaping the blog. Several cases of blogging can be distinguished:
- Personal blogs, with no risk that blogging content would be mixed up with employers content
- Personal blogs overlapping with topics of the company or institution
- Official blogs of a company or institution, general or restricted to a special theme
This blog called blogstats is of the second kind.
The aim of blogstats
Blogstats is not an official blog. Blogstats creates a network for dissemination professionals mainly of statistical institutions. It is a meeting point where colleagues from Statistical Organizations share their experiences, successes and failures, focus attention on (new) developments and stay informed in the vast domain of disseminating (statistical) information.
It is our professional sharepoint 
and it is a test: This blog will live as long as there is an interest to exchange experiences.
Restrictions
The views expressed on this weblog are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of employers. Authors do not publish or mention documents or statements of institutions that are not officially accessible. They do not comment on strategies or politics of their institutions.
Blogstats is intended to be a multi-author blog. Everyone who wishes to post messages in this blog has to sign up an account in wordpress.com and to create an own personal blog with a name to choose. It is not neccessary to use this personal blog, it is just the username that is needed. Send the E Mail you used to create your blog to blogstats@gmx.net and you will become an author in blogstats.
After reception of the invitation go to wordpress.com, sign in with your username and password and choose blogstats.
As an author you can post new messages. It is important to assign one or more categories to your post in order to make them better accessible. You can also propose new categories to the mail address above.
I opened this blog in May 2006. My name is Armin Grossenbacher and I am working at Statistics Switzerland as Head of the Dissemination and Publication unit. I hope that many authors will join this blog and will help to make it a widely used dissemination forum. Please give Your opinion about such a blog in the comments to this post.
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Headers
The changing headers of this blog show pictures of towns where IMAODB Conferences took place.
Naantali, Finland, 2008
Bath. IMAODBC 2003
Annapolis, IMAODBC 2002
Den Haag IMAODBC 2005
Avila, IMAODBC 2006
Bath, IMAODBC 2003
Avila, IMAODBC 2006
Bath, IMAODBC 2003
Den Haag, IMAODBC 2005
Den Haag, IMAODBC 2005
Avila, IMAODBC 2006
Annapolis, IMAODBC 2002
Barney Castle Cork Ireland
Cork, IMAODBC 2007
Cork, IMAODBC 2007
Cork, IMAODBC 2007
Cork, IMAODBC 2007
Cork, IMAODBC 2007
Cork, IMAODBC 2007
Adelboden Switzerland December 2007
Bingo!
Congratulations, Armin, for being a pioneer and starting up a discussion forum for communication-oriented and interested people interested in the development of statistical information and its new and ever more effective forms of dissemination.
After the IMAODBC [International marketing and output database conference] in Mt. Tremblant, Canada, in 2002 there was a voluntary effort by somebody in the Luxembourg statistical office to keep up the discussion. That activity, however, faded away, because it was technically not so developed. This initiative of Armin seems to be better and I wish it all the possible success.
There is an often ignored bias in the commonly used life expectancy at birth. Because it is an arithmetic mean, an average, this statistic is unduly biased by those who die in the first few vulnerable years of life. Thus a life expectancy of 40 does not necessarily imply that there are very few old people around.
I would think that for general use, median life expectancy would be superior, or mean life expectancy at 5 or 10 or even 20 if you wish to still use an arithmetic mean. Wouldn’t a comparison between those be instructive?
We are experimenting with social indicators and visualization on the Web as well, during a summer school.
If you are interested, please check
http://webvalley2008.fbk.eu