But now, students, journalists, and everyone else can access data straight from the source - the actual statistics published by the UN.

Using UN Data

Underneath the search box on the homepage are a few popular searches, based on what users are searching for the most. You can either click on those or enter in your own keywords to begin.

For example, to see data about a country, you just enter in the country's name and click "Search." The search result will take you to a landing page where some general information about the country is provided, like population, GDP, life expectancy, etc. You can click the link to "view full profile" to get the full details of that country's statistics.

To the left, is a box where you can apply filters to your search by specifying that you want to include or exclude certain information from your search.

Below the country's profile are all the search results for that country. Each result has a "Download" link to download the data, but there is also a handy "Preview" link which will open a small window displaying the data, so you don't have to navigate away from the page you're on to see if that data is what you were looking for. Another link, "Explore," allows you to delve into to related data sources around that topic.

You can do more than search for data on specific countries or regions, though. You can also search for data about global statistics, like greenhouse gas emissions or global solar production statistics (well, that's what I looked up).

What's great about the UN Data site is not just the ability to access this huge database of statistics (currently 55 million+ records), but the well-designed way that such massive amounts of data have been provided to the public. Anyone can use this database - school kids, techies, even mom and dad. This is one site that is definitely worth a look.

In light of Facebook's recently announced vanity URL availability, founder Jesse Stay writes, "We're extending our existing Facebook profile redirect URLs, which redirect yourusername.socialtoo.com to your Facebook profile, and adding an additional layer of analytics to the whole process. So tonight, you'll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you'll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we'll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they're using, where they're located, and where they're clicking from." And yes, there's an app for that.

Here are some examples of the types of data users will be able to see:

To get the analytics-powered profile, all a user needs to do is register an account, click on the link to get a special code from Facebook, provide the code (along with a SocialToo username and password), and submit that information. No Twitter username is necessary, although providing Twitter information will give users additional features for Twitter. When the user logs in, he will see the new "SocialStats" tab with statistics for their URL.

The enhancement is visible once you log in to your Lijit account. Just click on the 'search widget' button in the navigation bar and the new option will be obvious in the upper-right corner. Once you fill out the form with your (second) blog's details, the new widget can be customized and deployed.

Lijit warns that the widgets are still walled off in different accounts. This means you won't be able to see combined search results or statistics. However, this is still bound to be a big time-saver, since it means you don't have to remember and re-enter two sets of credentials.

In case you have more than one account already created, Lijit recommends you contact them via their Feedback page and they can help you merge them.

It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the "insight" button next to each video on your account view.

Geographic location is also reported as part of the Insight package. Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video's relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic. It's a great little metrics package.

Presumably YouTube isn't getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate. Since such views are unlikely to be counted, perhaps I should spare the fluffy little baby chick. Oh what the heck, let's give it a try.

These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.

It would be nice if users were given the option to publicly expose their video Insight statistics and could view them on a chanel-wide basis instead of just for a single video. Update! I was wrong, several readers pointed out that YouTube does offer aggregate demographics of all your videos! Thanks, friends!

While overall blog mentions of Obama and McCain varied greatly during the last year (and we can't say if those were positive or negative posts), close to 500 million blog postings mentioned him since the beginning of the conventions at the end of August. During the same time period, only about 150 million blog posts mentioned McCain (though it would also be interesting to see similar statistics for Governor Palin as well).

Twitter and MySpace

On social networks, Obama also held a clear lead, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared to McCain's 219,404. Just between November 3rd and November 4th (election day), Obama gained over 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, Obama gained 2865 new followers between the 3rd and 4th (for a total of 118,107), while John McCain's Twitter account only has a paltry 4942 followers in total.

There are, of course, a lot of reasons for why Barack Obama's campaign gained a lot more traction on social networks and blogs than the McCain campaign. The demographics of social media users tend to fall in line more closely with those of today's Democratic voters, for example. However, looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril.

See also: Obama's Social Media Advantage, Act II

UPDATE: Turns out the new design wasn't so great after all. SiteMeter has implemented an immediate rollback to the old design!

SiteMeter has made a switch from a codename based management system to an email based system. This means that users can now consolidate their SiteMeter accounts under one email address. In doing so, users will be required to reactivate their accounts under their email address. You can even group your premium account reports by topics to compare and contrast the data of all your sites .

Visually, the service has redesigned the way users can now view their data. Statistics can now be visually seen using charts, graphs, or a table view. Choose date ranges of data to view, export your data, view demographics and do a ton more via a sweet visual interface. SiteMeter is also reporting to have more accurate data for visitor counts and page views by differentiating between visitors and unique visitors. All of your statistics are available visually and textually for any section of the service.

Taking Notes

With some of the new features, we have to wonder if SiteMeter decided to take a couple of visual cues from Google's popular Analytics service. Whether they have or haven't, SiteMeter has certainly done a great job on an long over-due upgrade. However, we're not sure if the new features are enough to keep users from using Google Analytics for free. If you're a user of SiteMeter, let us know what you think of the site's redesign and changes in the comments section.

Swimming with the Stream

There has, however, been a clear shift in the types of applications that are becoming more popular right now. The new emphasis on the stream is driving users to apps that are able to leverage the feed, while those apps that haven't adapted to this new reality yet will find it increasingly hard to get any kind of critical mass on the service.

Thankfully, as Nik points out, Feedburner addressed the issue and the RSS subscriber stats of the blog in question are now showing the correct figure. I can verify that I checked this myself, before said blog removed access to his Feedburner chicklet. The rightful figure is less than 30,000 - not quite "hundreds of thousands" I think you'll agree.

It's great that Feedburner fixed this issue quickly (and thank you to Pageflakes for also working it out), but really this kind of web stats exaggeration has to stop, for the good of the industry. While Google is trying its best to stamp out click fraud on CPC ads, there is a more subtle fraud that can be perpetrated by fudging your web stats - either through quoting outlandish Urchin or web server stats, or by other means.

The company's Twitter statistics (as with all URL shortening services) are used to determine and aggregate Twitter trends by Tweetmeme; however, as of today, according to the company these statistics "can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward." Tr.im links will continue to redirect until at least December 31, 2009.

In the meantime, a reminder once again to contribute your Feedburner stats to the collaborative project I'm running. A lot of people have linked to this, but not enough people have posted their stats (or emailed them to me if they want to be anon). So come on peeps, if you're a Feedburner user then join us in this collaborative effort to get some decent RSS subscription statistics.

Thinking big... Anil Dash proposed in the comments to my post yesterday an even more ambitious project:

A great idea and if the current Feedburner stats collaboration works out - i.e. people in the blogosphere get involved - then perhaps what Anil suggested will be Phase 2. This could grow into a full-fledged Open Source RSS Statistics project! [ed: settle down Richard...]

Back to the present, I like how Jon Udell described our current effort:

Amen to that. Also a big thanks to Dick and Eric from Feedburner for their help in setting this up. Their post on it is here.

One Final Pitch

I see Steve Rubel has published his Sitemeter traffic stats today. I invited him in the comments of that post to participate in our Feedburner stats project. And I'd like to extend that invitation to everyone else in the blogosphere:

1. If you use Feedburner, please consider volunteering your data (or send it to me by email if you don't want it to be public). It doesn't matter if you have 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 subscribers - all data is equally important.

2. If you don't use Feedburner, you can still contribute by analyzing the data. I'm particularly keen on getting some neat visualizations.

3. Even if you don't do either of the above, you can help by publicising this project. Blog it, baby!

As Jon said, we're not sure how this is going to turn out. I'm a bit afraid that only a few people will contribute their data. My hope of course is that loads of people participate - because the more people that get involved, the more useful the resulting RSS statistics will be.

The layout of the app is simple. It's screen after screen of statistics about the terrorist attacks that day as well as updates as to where we stand today. Each stat focuses on a number (hence the "numbers" in the app's title) and then explains what that particular number refers to. For example, "24" is the number of people still classified as "missing" from the World Trade Center. "16" is the number of survivors from WTC South's point of impact. "1776" is the number of feet high the Freedom Tower memorial will be.

In the background behind the text is an image of the New York skyline and the Tribute in Light memorial, an installation of 88 searchlights which projects two vertical columns of light into the sky.

The app offers a creative and interesting way to remember 9/11. And as the app's description reads, "not forgetting is not enough - it's also important to grasp the measure of what transpired."

Currently, the stats package does lack a few important metrics such as search engine referral information, being able to tell where users bail on a video, and general link referral info. Chan did seem to indicate that referral information would be available at some point, though.

According to Chan, Insight turns YouTube into "one of the world's largest focus groups." What it really does, though, is add another piece of the puzzle for YouTube to become what Google wants it to be: the place where all the world's videos are stored. We reported a couple of weeks ago on additions to YouTube's API that will enable YouTube to become more like a content delivery network (think: Akamai or Limelight for videos of your cat). As YouTube says, they are now "an open, general purpose, video services platform, available for use by just about any third-party website, desktop application, or consumer device." Adding detailed video stats simply makes YouTube that much more attractive to use as a video host.

If Facebook continues at this rate, by the end of December they could add a total of 20 million new users. By March, the company could then reach 200 million active users - which would mean they doubled their userbase in less than a year's time. The majority of this growth (70%) is taking place outside the U.S.

To handle this growth, a poster on Slashdot notes that "the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Facebook's Users Are Active and Engaged

Facebook did release some figures of their own today that show their users are actively using the site and engaged with the content. Here's what they reported:

General Growth

• More than 140 million active users
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

User Engagement

• Average user has 100 friends on the site
• 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications

• More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
• More than 2 million events created each month
• More than 19 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth

• More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development
• More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Platform

• More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
• More than 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Also worth noting is the data on mobile users released last month which revealed that the company has 15 million active mobile users using their site, having grown from only 5 million at the beginning of the year. Those aren't additional users, but are a subset of the 140 million who use the site from their mobile phones and other devices. We can't help but think those numbers were also aided by the September launch of Facebook's iPhone app, version 2.0. The new release, a huge improvement over the original, managed to pack in nearly every feature from social network including wall posts, status updates, the news feed, photos and more, all from the simplified iPhone interface.

How to Get More Stats

If you like delving into statistics or are just looking for specific information on Facebook demographics, the AllFacebook site has a pretty handy online tool available. With it, you can use drop-down boxes to select country, gender, and age range and have the tool chart that data on the screen for you. You can compare up to three companies using this tool.

Image credits: top chart, Inside Facebook; bottom chart, AllFacebook

Although HTML emails aren't anything new, and can easily contain the code to an embedded video player, Goodmail's system is tuned toward the needs of larger customers who would like to bring something extra to their opt-in email campaigns. Their video platform is, by their description, very flexible in relation to which player can be used, how long the video clips are, and how the player is styled. Plus, detailed campaign statistics are available on the player, such as how many people watched the video. Similar statistics are available on the email portion of the campaign as well.

Another email video effort that has been in the works, initially geared more toward individual use, is MotionNotes by Whiteboard Labs. Their platform allows customers to compose video messages or choose YouTube videos, customized with a theme, and then send them to their friends. Although they offer a free account to individuals, they also offer a vertical Pro version that is designed with campaigns in mind.