Why open standards matter

On this blog we usually showcase best practices of how to communicate statistics and keep the technological aspects of it in the background – which is the right way to do. But we also never get tired of mentioning how statistics is a basis for informed decision making and therefore a foundation for democracy. To [...]

Infographics that People Understand – Book Review

Stephen Few in his Blog ‘Visual Business Intelligence’ is enthusiastic about a new book dealing with information visualisation: ‘At Last, a Scientific Approach to Infographics‘.
The book written by Connie Malamed: Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand,
Rockport Publishers, Inc., 2009.

Real-time Search

In the age of microblogging search engines have to be very, very quick in indexing the continuous stream of information. The search engine Collecta indexes blogs, blog comments, microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku and also fotos in Flickr.

In order to find out more about search engines beyond Google see the article of  Ryan Singel in WIRED [...]

Blog about Stats on twitter

Microblogging (like twitter) provides short messages of a person or institution.
Blog about Stats uses twitter as complementary tool, providing hints and links on what’s new, interesting, strange in the field of  disseminating statistics: This is ‘Blog Stats’ Hints‘. It’s also possible to follow the microblogs of other people and institutions.
The newest short messages are shown [...]

Information aesthetics

This site information aesthetics brings a lot of traffic to Blog about Stats these days. It’s worth being explored! And it’s in the blogroll now.

A Tool Shed using Semantic Web

More and more Web 2.0 applications give us more and more possibilities to manage and share our bookmarks, our RSS feeds, our photos and so on: iGoogle, netvibes, linkedin, del.icio.us, flickr, twitter … but let’s be honest:  We don’t have time for all these applications, we risk to get lost.
Now a second generation of applications [...]

World Stats Clock

There are lots of clocks and counters. This here seems to be a quite sophisticated one (flash needed).

Thanks to Jürg Stuker for this hint
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Hint #2

Google.com analyses your IP address and redirects you to your local google search site (google.fr, google.ch etc.). This may be useful for normal searches. But sometimes you want to go to google.com and look for news and products which are accessible only there.
Wanting to do so you have to type in google.com/ncr. ncr stands [...]

Hint #1

Sometimes you surely want to shoot an image of a website and put it in an article or a blog. How do you do this? SHIFT Print Screen -> grafic editor -> save as jpeg ..? It’s much easier with browser based tools. There are plugins for Internet Explorer 7 and for Firefox.
IE7: IE7pro
Firefox: Pearl [...]