Listening to representatives of Gapminder or Swivel one could think official statistics is just naked data, difficult to access and not considering new technologies. Is this true? I don’t think so. There are hundreds of well presented websites of statistcal institutions (see the list) and many interesting forms of presentation. There are interactive graphs, online atlases, podcasts … . However, all this is not always very well known.
Web 2.0 applications like blogs allowing to comment data, wikis or video presentations are rare to find.It would be an absorbing task to to raise an inventory of innovative and popular presentations on official statistical websites.
Why not? Let’s begin to compile a list of official statistic’s innovations (“Innolist”) . Here it comes:
World Bank Learning Center (interactive maps)
Atlas of the European Regions (English version to come soon), Statistics Switzerland
Business Cycle Tracer (needs SVG), Statistics Netherlands
Table Graphs Maps TGM, interactive indicators, Eurostat (Beta version, link to be published soon)
Wikiprogress (project of OECD)
UK ONS Area Classification for Local Authorities
Statistics Zurich: Babie’s names. It’s not really statistics, but highly popular .. and a fascinating presentation.
OECD Country Statistical Profiles. OECD Data in SDMX Format put into Adobe Flex, interactive. Double Click and you get the country in a second graph, with comparisons.
Comparator, Statistics Switzerland. Choose data from two geographical units and compare them. National and International views. Choose the comparator in the right hand column after opening a region/nation.
Destatis has launched a “Foreign Trade Atlas” by applying the technology of an Internet Map Server (IMS). Interactive maps allow to explore the import and export values for about 200 goods with about 240 tradepartners of Germany.
Statistics Canada: Multimedia vignettes produced as part of the release of the 2006 Census results.
More to come with a little help from my friends sending their proposals to blogstats at gmx dot net….
Blog about Stats 
Hallo Armin, ich schreibe gerade an einem Artikel, der genau das versucht: eine Bestandaufnahme der “Amtlichen Statistik 2.0” von Blog bis Tagsonomies.
This is a good idea. Other examples include:
UK ONS Area Classification for Local Authorities
UK ONS Population Pyramid
> (needs SVG)
(IE users need plug-in) maybe ?
Or doesn’t it work with the native SVG rendering of other browsers ?
Armin, my impression of Gapminder is 180 degrees from yours. Rather than statistics as “naked data,” Gapmider applications are all about putting data in context in order to tell a story. For more on this, see my column “Make Your Data Tell a Story” at
http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196602724
Seth
Very interesting blog. We have been testing Adobe Flex. See link below for the OECD Country Statistical profiles. Right click to get the source code. This application needs Flash Player 9.0 installed.
http://stats.oecd.org/nawwe/csp/default.html
The European Central Bank have also adopted Flex for dynamic graphics. Flex is now open source under the Mozilla project.
Russ (OECD)
To Seth
Oh no, we are of the same opinion! My post says just that.
Look at 033 Statistical literacy, and especially at the post about gapminder
Destatis has launched a “Foreign Trade Atlas” by applying the technology of an Internet Map Server (IMS). Interactive maps allow to explore the import and export values for about 200 goods with about 240 tradepartners of Germany.
I invite you to visit
http://www.destatis.de/aussenhandelsatlas
(currently only in German language)
The real power of linking data, new digital information sources with social media will only start to be fully realised in 2010-2011
Agreed.