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Content Aggregation with Rapid IntelligenceUsing unique web mining and data warehousing techniques, we create large-scale popular websites for a wide variety of commercial and pro bono purposes. Our sites use the internet itself as a vast data source in order to provide users with original and informative views of content. NewsNEW DATABASEMon 2 Apr 07
We've just put live a significant revision of our technology on Factbites. Now there's more and higher quality results. We hope you notice the difference! Also, we have a new feature on the way which will be pretty obvious once it hits the site. Stay tuned.
Thanks for all the words of support. It keeps us motivated more than anything else. WE'RE SITE OF THE WEEK Mon 18 Dec 06
Respected US education magazine, District Administration has just made StateMaster its Web Site of the Week. We're chuffed here at Rapid.
A big stat update is on the way soon, by the way. This is for both NationMaster and StateMaster. NATIONMASTER ON SEARCHENGINEWATCH Thu 14 Dec 06
Mary Ellen Bates just gave us a nice review of NationMaster at SearchEngineWatch.
As researchers and information professionals are called upon to provide not just information but intelligence, NationMaster.com is a great resource for gaining new insights from the available information. She mentioned StateMaster too, which was nice. I look forward to seeing what the traffic looks like. I remember a few years back we got a flood of email asking quite a range of detailed questions about our sources, then checked our stats to see we'd been on the front page of conspiracy site, Rense.com. :) FACTBITES IN THE NEWS Wed 29 Nov 06
I forgot to mention. Factbites launched an In The News feature to the front page of the site. This links to hot topics that are being discussed in the news that day.
Rapid Intelligence, keepin' it fresh. PLAGIARISM ON WIKIPEDIA Mon 6 Nov 06
Wikipedia-Watch.org owner, Daniel Brandt has published a report showing widespread plagiarism in Wikipedia.
A more sophisticated methodology could be used here. One idea that has just hit me would be using archive.org and the Wikipedia history function to discover phrases that appeared on other sites first. This could be all automated. But such activity should be applauded. Whatever people may speculate about Daniel Brandt's motives, the same thing could have been done by a Wikipedian with the same positive effect: as an open system that assimilates criticism, it will learn and evolve from negative press out there. And as a fast moving encyclopedia, it can react quickly to address the problem. UPDATED CIA DATA Wed 27 Sep 06
We've just updated our CIA Factbook data on NationMaster once again with 236 stats added or updated. The big standout are terrorism stats spanning time periods back to 1968 and 2000.
We've also done some extra work with the data ourselves doing things like splitting up exchange rates by year, having a stat for each major religion (instead of listing them all together). This makes it easier to graph and compare nations, staying true to our mission. Enjoy! FACTBITES ON THE UP Mon 18 Sep 06
Our FactBites site is enjoying growing traffic, and I've just read a great review on the blog of Matthew Hurst, Director of Research at Intelliseek:
The results that Factbites generates are still extracts from web pages, but they are of far higher quality than the summaries that main stream web search engines provide. By focusing the technology on passages that make statements about the topic being searched for, the user experiences a far richer response. It should be noted that this type of interface has the potential to change the way in which searches are performed as the search engine is now doing more of the heavy lifting and is not trying to guess the intention of the user.The site also has an In The News feature now, linking to the recent topics. OH TUBE, MIRROR MY WORLD Thu 14 Sep 06 FACTBITES GETTING FATTER Mon 28 Aug 06
I've just updated a new index for our site FactBites. It now fields 2 million keywords. More features to come.
CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH? Fri 25 Aug 06
Or "If I say something weird, will you leave me and never come back?"
A big issue with running stat sites is providing relevant, useful info that users understand while not cutting down what the users see until they can't question you. On NationMaster and StateMaster, there are thousands of stats, so you're always confronted with contradictions. Figures seemingly don't make sense when you put them altogether. Our competitors like the CIA World Factbook have so few stats that inconsistencies can't arise. It's the easy option. Our correlations feature wasn't as much of a hit as I'd hoped, because people looked at the data and said "wa? Murder rate correlates to gun ownership that makes sense. But look it correlates even more strongly to orange juice consumption!" In a world without sites like NationMaster, we just leave it to experts to select which stats are most relevant. Of course an expert is by definition someone more knowledgable of the domain, so they will be able to digest the info more readily. But when more statistically significant figures are lying around and are not used, everyone should have access to them so they can ask why. Now with SEO Sleuth, I chose to show every search going to every site. Now, any webmaster can tell you that people come to your site looking for pretty different things to what the site offers. And looking at the terms as a whole may give you a distorted view of what the site's about (but perhaps a good view of what parts of the site are of interest to searchers). But yeah, we're left with the same problem; people give a quick "that doesn't look right" and leave the site. One thing I considered was linking to the actual searches to prove it, but I didn't want to be republishing such sensitive data. So once again, the quandry. CLIMBING OVER THE GREAT FIREWALL Tue 22 Aug 06 Got this email recently about our Qwika product which includes Wikipedia mirrors. This is the sort of mail that makes it all worthwhile: I am in china .maybe you know ,the wikipedia was blocked in china . I visited your web site and i find that i can read the articles from wikipedia by clicking the "cached "in the searching results .it is wonderful !now i can read the full text but no images . i very appreciate your work !It's also a good argument for free content being available through many sources, which is the spirit of the GFDL anyway. WHAT TURNS ME ON Tue 22 Aug 06
Blogging as a medium is supposed to allow people to be a little more personal. While I don't feel much need to talk much about my private life, I would really like to talk about why I do what I do.
I've been programming since I was 5 and doing generating stats for communities since I was 13 (back in the days of BBS's). Since then I've worked for a publisher, a web developer and an internet marketing agency. Now almost 30, and 4 years into running my own business, the same thing has always driven me. For me, I have an introverted motivation and an extraverted one. On the internal side of things, it's all about that eureka moment when something new arises out of nothing. When the machine gives you back something more intelligent and sophisticated than the code you wrote to discover it. For the outer world, it's about knowledge; helping more people see the facts for themselves, without relying on any elite to digest them first. NationMaster and StateMaster are referenced thousands of times on the web. For whenever you're in a discussion or debate, you know there's one site you can go to compare countries/states on just about anything. Of course you can generally use stats to support either side of an argument, but it does increase the quality of the debate and encourages people to find common ground in some area approaching reality. Politics is very polarised these days, particularly in the US and the mass media landscape are more bombarded by sophisticated PR and marketing than ever. Our society in general is growing exponentially more complex. The reality of looking at a stat site like NationMaster is that you're going to be confronted with figures that don't fit nicely with your belief system, or even rival belief systems. Stats aren't perfect, but they bring people closer to the complexity of reality. That's something I really hope we can get on top of in this coming information age. ANNOUNCING SEO SLEUTH Mon 21 Aug 06
Tuesday 8th August was an adrenaline pumping day for me. Sitting on the ferry I was going through newly downloaded files on my laptop's desktop and came across these large gzips a mate had sent me that morning. I was thinking it was going to be that Google N-gram data. But browsing through it, it was clear these were searches, millions of them! I let out an involuntary audible expletive and then day I wondered round the city thinking up things to do with the data.
The most obvious site, it seemed, would be one that allows ordinary people to read this goldmine of personal information, instead of just people who knew how to read large files. (I was surprised by a number of news stories on the subject where the journalist disclaimed that they hadn't seen the data themselves). But I thought that was a bit unethical. As it turns out, there's no shortage of such sites out there now with dontdelete.com and aolsearchdatabase.com among the more popular. I also started to see more research-oriented sites crop up that looked at it completely in aggregate - what proportion of people click which ranked result for all terms, how long is the tail and such. With my background in search, what was really interesting for me was the possibility of generating search engine reports for any site. Except for the rare occasion when a log reports are made publically available, we really don't know what people search for to find our competitors' sites. And the results are certainly interesting. For example, The Open Directory Project's incoming keywords are predominently adult. The top term is actually "adult" itself. Next thing I did was a transpose: for given keyword, it will tell you which sites get the traffic and where they rank. Obviously simply performing a search and seeing what ranks best is the traditional way of doing this, but very often lower ranking sites get more traffic. Knowing both where the results rank and how much traffic they got, and being able to look at the original search (just click on the keyword title) you can then use the tool to work out which sites had the best titles and descriptions (or perhaps brand power). Anyway check it out. The site as had some success with mentions on Threadwatch and the New Scientist blog. AZZURRI CLAIM 4TH WORLD CUP TITLE Sat 29 Jul 06
It certainly did live up to the hype of being the 64th game in the 2006 World Cup. With France and Italy knotted at 1-1, the match went into extra time, where the French captain Zinedine Zidane was sent off with a red card for head butting Marco Materazzi in the chest. It proved to be a death knell for France, as they went into penalty kicks without their leader, and lost 5-3.
NationMaster, in between matches, has been slowly keeping tally of statistics with an eye to compiling the most complete tables on World Cup history. You won't find these totals anywhere else on the net. Total World Cup Points Total World Cup Wins Total World Cup Draws Total World Cup Losses Total World Cup Goals Scored Total World Cup Goals Against Total World Cup Matches Played Enjoy our new World Cup totals, and see you in 2010! EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE.. Mon 24 Jul 06
I just saw ClickTale in delicious. It will allow webmasters to view movies of their users' behaviour on their site, right down to mouse movements.
There's a lot of potential here. It could be a real help in isolating bugs. When a user writes a complaint email, match his IP/cookie to the profile and just watch exactly what he did. Then even those myriad "i went to ur website and it doesnt work" would be become useful. And mouse tracking alone, wow. I can imagine in the not too distant future, I let a shaky old person take the keyboard and when I get it back, the ads on all my favourite sites are related to Parkinson's Disease. When they see the mouse get up to speed again the ads may ask me to write a testimonial for their miracle cure. STATEMASTER.COM - TWIN PROJECT OF NATIONMASTER Fri 14 Apr 06
Since NationMaster.com exploded onto the scene some three years ago, there have been faint voices in our minds that have grown louder as the critical success of the world's largest stat database for comparing countries was affirmed over and over again. That voice said something simple but powerful: 'you can do more with this formula'. So early on, we focused our sights on US states.
It frankly surprised us that with such a tremendous amount of complete and timely data emanating from US governmental agencies, NGO's, and research institutes that a project of compiling all of this data into one easy-to-use database had not yet been undertaken. Perhaps we were missing something; perhaps no one cares about statistics on the percentage of African Americans in the Army, or the number of inmates executed by the electric chair in Florida, or what New York's expenditure is for elementary and secondary education. But the more we talked about the possibilities of StateMaster.com, the more folks around us became excited as well. It was apparent that the web was missing something, not us. So here are the fruits of our labor: StateMaster.com, which is launched with 2,613 stats, hundreds of maps and flags, and our unique visualization technology which allows you to see critical data in new and revealing ways. But this is only the beginning. We will be adding new stats all the time, as well as new state information, maps and flags. So be sure to check back in with us, and if you are interested in helping us out with this project consider being a Volunteer Editor. From all of us here at StateMaster and NationMaster, thank you for your tremendous support! STATEMASTER, SISTER SITE TO NATIONMASTER, IS LAUNCHED TODAY Wed 12 Apr 06
StateMaster, a free online resource for comparing US states, has been released today. We have translated our winning formula of statistical comparisons, graphs, maps and flags to the 50 states of America, giving our users another level of data at their fingertips. With over 2,500 stats on StateMaster, you can find information on anything from binge drinkers to
p>race related hate crimes.
Detailed state profiles, as well as thousands of maps and flags, are also included in the database, making us a one-stop resource for information about US states. Visit StateMaster Now! Keep in mind that our Volunteer Editor program will also be implemented for StateMaster, bringing together a community of folks interested in data and general information on US states. Let us know if you are interested! NATIONMASTER TOOLBAR NOW AVAILABLE FOR MOZILLA AND INTERNET EXPLORER Wed 18 Jan 06
Do you want country profile information and the latest statistics available to you at a single click of a mouse? Do you want to search any text you highlight, view web site rankings instantly and block those pesky pop-ups? Then download our free NationMaster Toolbar for Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorer and stay on top of an ever-chaging world!
 Go directly to the Toolbar Download Page This Toolbar is located on your browser, and gives you instant access to NationMaster's database. For those of you who downloaded our previous plug-in (see the previous news blog), this new Toolbar gives you even more functionality, increasing the quality and speed of your research, and making your general surfing experience more informative and enjoyable. Search NationMaster's database by simply typing your query into the search field, but perhaps our favorite feature is the 'search highlight' function, which allows you to highlight any text on any web page, right click your mouse, and search the NationMaster database for that keyword. You can also click on the NationMaster icon to go directly to statistical category pages, or view country profiles of major countries. The Toolbar also gives you instant site rankings for all websites and blocks pop-ups on Internet Explorer. Downloading the NationMaster Toolbar takes only a few brief moments. Click here to install the NationMaster Toolbar for Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorer. NATIONMASTER'S NEW GEOLAB Fri 9 Dec 05
Teachers: looking for online tests which will improve your students' geography skills? Try NationMaster's new GeoLab, designed by Professor Steven M. Graves of California State University. Using this GeoLab, students follow directions for navigating NationMaster's site, viewing specific graphs, maps, scatterplots and correlations and answering questions about the data. All major areas of our statistical database are covered. At the end of the lab, students will be able to formulate their own correlation hypothesis, outlining a strong or weak correlation between two statistical variables and testing that hypothesis using Nationmaster's correlation technology. Students can then submit his/her GeoLab results directly to their teachers e-mail address. We hope to add more GeoLabs in the future, so check back in with us regularly!
Click here to see NationMaster's new GeoLab! NATIONMASTER UNVEILS NEW REDESIGN... Wed 9 Nov 05
We've spent many days redesigning our pages, and you can now witness the fruits of our labor: a new bold look for NationMaster! Our hope is to add to the functionality of our site, making it easier to navigate and more entertaining to use. Our search functions are updated and streamlined, making your stat search that much easier and quicker, giving you access to our database in mere seconds! As you may well be aware, this new look follows on the heels of our decision to make the entire site free for all users. With this new redesign, when you are viewing a certain statistic, correlations and graphing tools are more easily accessible: with just a click of a button you can view up-to-date information with our unique visualization technology. Feel free to let us know if our redesign makes your researching and stat surfing more user-friendly. Our redesign not only effects your ability to use our site; it also includes new behind-the-scenes technology that allows us to update our database more quickly and easily. This technology upgrade translates into more time-sensitive information at your fingertips, existing stats getting even more frequent updates, and new stats added at the drop of a hat. The ball is rolling at NationMaster: evermore relevant, evermore accurate, and getting larger all the time! In other news, we've just made a NationMaster search engine plug-in for Mozilla-based browsers. This allows you to search NationMaster pages no matter what website you happen to be on, an excellent search function located on your toolbar. NATIONMASTER.COM BECOMES ENTIRELY FREE! Wed 2 Nov 05
Today the world's most popular online statistics database becomes entirely free!
NATIONMASTER MAKES AVAILABLE CORRELATING TOOLS ON COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD. Wed 2 Nov 05
Budapest, Hungary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE NationMaster Makes Available Correlating Tools on Countries of the World NationMaster.com, the world’s largest online statistical database for country comparisons, has today announced free access to their correlation tools. This service allows the user to compare any two statistics (out of a database of over 5,700) in order to shed new light on information highly-useful to journalists, writers, professors and the general public. Correlations can therefore be used to inform debates on crime, politics, education, poverty and so on. “We’ve seen NationMaster quoted in thousands of online debates,” says John Steinmetz, Content Manager for NationMaster, “and it’s true that statistics can be dangerous; they can be used to justify anything. We actually found a blogger using NationMaster’s information to prove that there is a link between child poverty and the number of television sets in a country. It then occurred to us, why not develop a technology that would allow our users to take any two statistics from our database and compare them, revealing hidden statistical relationships.” Using NationMaster’s correlations, strong links can be found between: • A large number of prisoners in a country and high teenage pregnancy. • A high external debt of a country and a large population of elderly. • A large population of couples with children and a high number of McDonalds in a country. Rather than NationMaster.com coming to conclusions about a given set of data, these applications allow users to develop their own comparisons and, in effect, arrive at their own assumptions and conclusions. “Never has such a tool been applied to so much data, and available to so many people,” Steinmetz says, “we are trying to start a statistics revolution. We want to give people access to information, and make it fun and interesting. We think there’s something intriguing about Malaysia having the lowest rate of cinema attendance in the world, or Iceland having twice as many tractors per capita than any other country. These correlations take it to another level, bringing to surface a lot of questions that are never asked, some bizarre and entertaining, others enlightening and speaking volumes about our world.” This free correlations tool is just the latest in a series of statistical visualization technologies, which includes scatterplots and mapping applications. The website offers users a database on thousands of statistics in categories such as health, government, identification, mortality and people, as well as providing general country information, maps and flags, lesson plans for teachers, forums, and a student area. It was recently listed by NielsenNet ratings as one of the top ten fastest growing educational reference sites, viewed by over 1 million Americans last month. FROM THE MAKERS OF NATIONMASTER - FACTBITES! Mon 11 Apr 05
What do you get if you cross a search engine with an encyclopedia? The answer arrived on the net today - Factbites (www.Factbites.com), a new approach to search. Under the slogan "where results make sense", Factbites provides searchers with full sentences about their search topic, rather than the sentence fragments most search engines offer.
Areas of ExpertiseOur specialised expertise in the fields of computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and evolving algorithms ensures that our sites are growing, vibrant, and fed by a constant stream of web data. We take sophisticated machine learning technologies of a type normally only used by large corporate entities and make them available to internet users generally.The highly acclaimed results range from the intelligent and authoritative to the quirky and amusing. NationMaster, our best-known site, has been featured in The New York Times, CNN and the BBC and is recommended by the Harvard Business School and the American Library Association. Our search engine/encyclopedia hybrid FactBites has already attracted favourable comment in BusinessWeek and SearchEngineJournal, and is rapidly gaining popularity as a respected alternative to Google for encyclopedia-style searches. More about us » |
Press ReleasesStateMaster launches today Qwika Released! NationMaster's Correlations tool is free! FactBites Released! Additional NationMaster Reviews:Nielsen//NetRatings sees NationMaster as one of the Top 10 Fastest Growing Educational Reference Sites. Note: this is a PDF file. If you do not have a PDF Reader, please click here for a free download. |
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I've been following the lonelygirl15 controversy like everyone. It's taken a lot of older people aback how popular this bedroom broadcasting medium has become. In fact, she is just one of many "vloggers" that have attracted audiences that some TV stations would envy. Yet most of what she says is actually pretty pedestrian and boring. What's going on? Don't people have better things to do on the net? Isn't supposed to be approaching sum of all knowledge?
When television first came out, they dreamed it would enlighten the masses, bringing far off civilisations and education into the living room. What ended up happening was families gathered round to watch sitcoms which were fictionalised mirrors of themselves - other families in domestic environments.
The internet was originally going to be the great educator, empowering everyone with all the world's knowledge. Now it's turning into a mirror too with kids watching other kids sitting in their bedrooms in front of their computer. And in the case of LonelyGirl, it's fictionalised too.