From the makers of NationMaster comes a new project aimed at harnessing the wealth of content of wikis.

It's called the The Full Wiki. Its goal is to become a platform for an enriched user experience for wikis using open licenses.

We have seen many fantastic projects come and go under the weight of traffic spikes, large datasets and the need to stay fresh. We want to provide serious hosting resources to make these projects feasible.

If you have a wiki oriented project you'd like us to host or provide other help, check out The Full Wiki.

We've been working away for the past month and are pleased to announce a raft of new little features:

• Refined moderation of user comments. Your valued contributions will appear on the site quicker.
  
• Top rankings pages now show the top 5 most popular stats for each variable, rather than the top 1.
  
• We've put a search box at the bottom of each page, so it's convenient to find new things out of our vast collection.
  
• The encyclopedia home page has been cleaned up, showing categories and themes.
  
• Best of all: you can now sort by amount and alphabetical order on graph pages with instant feedback. No need to wait for the page to reload

We hope these modifications improve your experience. Feel free to drop us a line with any thoughts of your own.

We are honoured to be listed among Australia's best web 2.0 applications this week. Ross Dawson produced a list for the prestigious Business Review Weekly showing our most internationally successful, innovative sites.

Two of our sites, FactBites and NationMaster, made the grade.

Geoff Evason put together a list ranking according to Quantcast traffic data alone. The list seems to have disappeared though, so I've reproduced it myself:

1. 1134 retailmenot.com
2. 6423 bugmenot.com
3. 18686 nationmaster.com
4. 41362 uvouch.com
5. 48887 minti.com
6. 53051 redbubble.com
7. 74603 atlassian.com
8. 76818 mebeam.com
9. 87651 spyk.com
10. 129624 swapace.com
11. 148185 blocklayer.com
12. 165573 fwditon.com
13. 195584 inthemix.com.au
14. 199477 globalsurfari.com
15. 203200 pikistrips.com
16. 222399 rememberthemilk.com
17. 280084 rocketreader.com
18. 332987 factbites.com
19. 426879 mig33.com
20. 522232 blogarate.com

THe middle column is rank according to Feb08 Quantcast data. This puts us in 3rd and 18th places. No matter how you cut it, Rapid Intelligence is one of Australia's top independent publishers.

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.

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. :)