World Development Data on Google

You can now get instant numbers and graphs on development data from countries round the world through Google Search. Here’s a screen shot showing some CO2 emissions data:

Here’s what Google’s own blog said on 11th November:

When we first launched public data on Google.com, we wanted to make statistics easier to find and to encourage debate based on facts rather than intuition. The day after we launched, a friend who worked at the World Bank called me, her voice filled with enthusiasm, "Did you know that the World Bank also just released an API for their data?" Excited, I checked it out, and found an amazing treasure trove of statistics for most economies in the world. After some hard work and analysis, today we’re happy to announce that 17 World Development Indicators (list below*) are now conveniently available to you in Google search.
With today’s update, you can quickly access more data with a broad range of queries. Search should be intuitive, so we’ve done the work to think through queries where public data will be most relevant to you. To see the new data, try queries like [gdp of indonesia], [life expectancy brazil], [rwanda's population growth], [energy use of iceland], [co2 emissions of iceland] and [gdp growth rate argentina]. For example, if you search for [internet users in the united states], you will see the following chart at the top of the results page:

Clicking on the result will bring you to an interactive chart where you can compare the United States with other regions around the world. We’ve also added a new feature to enable you to embed these charts in your own website or blog by clicking on the "Link" button in the upper right-hand corner of the chart page. You have the option to either embed the chart with static data, or you can also set the chart to update dynamically when new data becomes available. To give you a sense of what these charts look like, we’ve embedded the chart below comparing Internet users in the United States and South Korea:
We hope this new data and our new embedding feature will help facilitate quick and easy access to public statistics. There are still many other data sets and sources out there, and we’re excited about the possibilities for the future. If you’re a data publisher interested in making your data more easily discoverable in Google, please contact us.
* Complete list of World Bank indicators currently available: CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.

Filed under: Environment, Resources, Technology

New Ely Blogger

A warm welcome to Canon Richard Darmody, our latest clergy blogger.

Why has he started? Well, he’s both a Canon of Ely and a Norwich City fan and wants publicity for what he calls “a mad plan” to walk from Ely Cathedral to the sacred turf at Carrow Road the home of Norwich City Football Club. Why? To raise money for a school in South West Uganda called The Bishop’s School (not a Church School). The school is extremely basic and the children are all very needy.

I want to do something I’ve never done before and I want to help this cause. It’s given me a great buzz, but then I haven’t started the training in earnest yet! Watch this space!

http://walkforuganda.blogspot.com/

Filed under: Church of England, Technology

Mediaevalists’ Dream

Wheee! Medieval Games is being launched for the Wii. Bring on the jousting, catapults and dragons! Makers Vor2L Studios say: 

Relive the days of olde in this fun collection of 30 medieval-inspired mini games and tournament championships set in a charming storybook world. Featuring easy pick up and play action, light hearted humor and support for up to four players, Medieval Games is sure to be a family favorite.

 

Filed under: Technology

New Bible Study Blog

We started Mark’s Gospel in the morning prayer readings today. It’s inspired me to burn the midnight oil and put together a sort of daily reading blog that – for as long as I can keep it up – will give the day’s text from Mark (in a whiskery translation because of copyright) and a few thoughts – with the added twist that because it’s a blog you can easily add your own. So it can build up, if you’re interested, into a sort of group commentary. An index page makes it easy to backtrack to earlier passages. You’ll find it at

http://thebiblestudyblog.wordpress.com/.

Filed under: Resources, Technology

Wordle update

This is what Wordle made of my blog when I pointed at my RSS feed today. I presume it just reads the most recent posts and the ‘standing matter’. So …

Looking like Paul found just good enough young church.

Filed under: Technology

Buzz off

Buzzword experiment a total flop! Traffic for the following day, 4th July, was good for a Saturday (despite something going at Wimbledon, and a few others things across the pond). But WordPress tells me who lands on the site as a result of a search-engine lead, and the search terms they used were:

mustard tree  5
demolition of jerusalem church buildings  3
ordination photos  2
swaffham prior festival  2
westminster abbey 20th century martyrs r  2
st. paul found  2
ecumenical accompaniers  2
our lord looking over a picnic  2
david thomson chichester 
jesus washing feet 
still life table
all saints king’s lynn
swaffham festival
barbara carter hemingford abbots
miswak roots
vine branch
good childhood project
fr jamal khader
bones paul found
rev gita bond
swaffham prior july 2009
found bones of st. paul
edessa thomas
bones of st paul
mustard tree picture

I think I’ll just carrying on writing what I like; and perhaps you’d be good enough to carry en reading it if you like it too.

Filed under: Technology , Blog, buzz words

Still counting those sheep?

I posted earlier today on an experiment to see if including lots of popular search engine terms would bring lots of visitors to Bishop’s Blog. A company called Wordtracker have a good online/downloadable guide to the theory by the way that you can see here. It’s perhaps just a bit worrying that it’s major example is about selling vegetarian pet food (ot perhaps that’ll get lots of hits) …

Anyway, we’ll see how the experiment runs, but to date none of the clever words have led to search-engine clicks through to the esteemed Bishop’s Blog, while the most popular one that people have used turns out (for some unfathomable reason) our lord looking over a picnic.

Meanwhile, I have been installing a couple of new widgets that WordPress.com users like me can paste into text boxes in their sidebars (the operation is really quite painless, sir) alongside Feedjit that I was already using. That’s the one that generates the Live Traffic Feed box with the pretty national flags. On WordPress though you don’t get more detail than the approximate area the visitor seems to be coming from (it’s ISP registration place I suppose). And it doesn’t keep a tally of how many people have passed by.

So I hunted around a bit and hit on two other widgets that have probably betrayed my identity to the world, since they must be in this game for a reason, but I am trusting their words that the actual identities of everyone are secret and they’re just indulging in trafficking – well I suppose that’s not the right word, but I mean identifying patterns of traffic that are commercially of value to others.

Clustrmaps gives you a nice little world map to decorate your page, which has a visual indication (the red dots) of where visitors have come from, and keeps some stats behinds the scenes that you can access.

It doesn’t give you the classic Counter though, and for that I’ve turned to StatCounter. A bit of code pasted into the text box generates the counter, and you can then click through to their site and access some very detailed information about just who is visiting from where, going on to where, and all the rest.

Both widgets are free as long as your website/blog is weeny like mine, but if you start getting more than 500 visits a day StatCounter for instance will want to charge you for the service. Fair enough really. As I said, knowledge is (power) money.

But hang on, ordination photos is about to overtake our lord’s picnic …

Filed under: Technology , Blog, counters, website

Too much tech?

Messing around with technology today, and was amused to come across a killer cartoon by Noel Ford (the A1 artist who draws as on the left: hat-tip to his website). Two of Ford’s typical figures are looking at a  church noticeboard, on which is written:

Stay in touch while you’re on holiday! If you’re on Twitter, we tweet! Or read our Blog! All sermons available as downloadable PDFs! Full details on our Facebook profile!

The caption?

… and we used to grumble about not understanding archaic church language!

While we’re on noticeboards, churchnoticeboards report the world’s first  solar powered church noticeboard, complete with motion sensor so it only lights up when someone passes it. Amazing!

Filed under: Humour, Technology , Church, noticeboard

What’s the Buzz?

Are you playing the numbers game on the web? Even blogging  bishops have been known to need a nightly peek at their stats to make sure that the blog or twitterstream is on the up. Just like most clergy automatically do a headcount at services and hope it’s up not down (if it’s at their church; and … perish the thought).

Unlike with live congregations, there’s such a footfall though the web that just being there means that your site or flock slowly grows, I think. Even total rubbish seems to have attractions. I suppose I want to affirm that just being there, however many people show up, is also important for real-life churches. Waterden that I reported on yesterday for instance has tiny attendances. But it really matters spiritually that there are still points like that in our striving world.

But then again, I am also not at all afraid to bang on about the importance of church growth – and that includes bums on seats. If we mean what we say about Your Kingdom Come on Earth, and have a belief that God’s will is that all his creation is redeemed, then there is a lot of point in our sharing that will and asking ourselves how we can be sharing in the work. Including bringing individual people to faith.

Now there are ways of going about this, … and there are ways. All too often the assumption that the only way of sharing in God’s work here is doing things which embarrass either us or the people we are talking to puts us off doing anything. Anyone who works in mission or evangelism has seen this, but also knows there are plenty of other ways to do business. Try for instance www.evangelism.net and for an amazing world-wide booklist http://www.anglicancommunion.org/ministry/mission/commissions/missio/g_doc.cfm.

But back to the web-world. This thought was sparked off by listening to the rather funny BBC radio programme Electric Ink as I was driving yesterday. It’s a satirical comedy by Alistair Beaton in which old hacks meet new media in the newspaper industry. In Episode 5 (Listen now) Freddy introduces buzzwords to the paper’s web site. Get those much-searched words into your text and the hit-rate rockets. Needless to say most of the words were not ones normally in the vocabulary of respectable journalists, nor ones that I will repeat here.

Or should I? Perhaps making the occasional reference to free grace offered to those in the grip of drugs might make my Google-count climb. And no doubt it is tres jolie that I call my satnav voice angelina.

What I will do, by way of both information and experiment, is list some of most searched-for terms – and watch to see if this particular post attracts more attention than usual … All the information is from Google itself.

Terms that are rising fast right now
1. jonas salk
2. staple center
3. palmbeachpost
4. smallpox vaccine
5. charles drew
6. staplescenter
7. least common multiple
8. authorize.net down
9. wimbledon semi finals live
10. edward jenner
11. staples center los angeles
12. all recipes
13. doug pitt
14. wimbledon tv coverage
15. sarah palin
16. michael jackson memorial tickets
17. wimbledon finals 2009
18. rebecca corry
19. fireworks shows
20. semi charmed life lyrics

Fastest Rising  terms in 2008 in the UK
iplayer
facebook
iphone
youtube
yahoo mail
large hadron collider
obama
friv
jogos
wiki

Most Popular in 2008 in the UK
facebook
bbc
youtube
ebay
games
news
hotmail
bebo
yahoo
jobs

Filed under: Technology, Thoughts for the Day , BBC, bebo, ebay, Facebook, games, Google, hotmail, jobs, news, yahoo, Youtube

Family Fridge for Cool Families

What do you make of Alexi Deak’s pitch on Dragon’s Den for his Family Fridge idea?

It sort of does what it says on the tin. A simple registration (free) gives you and your ‘family’ access to a mini-web-site that lets you stick post-its and photos on your virtual fridge door, add items to a shared calendar, add to a notebook, and say what presents you fancy

Like a lot of these social networking ideas, it’s not too clear who’ll use it for what until it’s let loose. I fancy this once might suit our lot if we’re trying to organise a family event for instance.

Filed under: Technology