StateMaster

the full wiki marries Wikipedia and Google Maps.

Our new site, the full wiki has brought together Google Maps and Wikipedia. Now you can view any article on Wikipedia with all the locations mentioned on a Google Map.
You can see at a glance where most of the activity in the Renaissance happened, namely Europe and primarily in Italy. Where are the world's tornados? Or volcanos? Heat waves? Nuclear power plants? The map and the article are linked throughout. Click on a map marker and it jumps to that part of the article. Click on an article marker and it will show you that location on the map.
See for example our tourism fact map. If we click on Bangkok (Q), for example, we can see the relevant part of the article and learn that it's the third most visited city in the world. Or zooming into Europe and clicking on Nice, Wikipedia tells us it was one of the first and best established resorts in the French Riveria.
Some more examples: See what happened all around the world in 1945. See where the drug trade is carried out. Barack Obama has the most international background of any recent US president. See it mapped.

Announcing TheFullWiki

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.

Feature update

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.

NationMaster and FactBites top Web 2.0 apps

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.

We're Site of the Week

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.