Website changes in 2012

The International Education Statistics blog was started in 2005. Since then, the format has been repeatedly modified and additional features were added. For example, in December 2010, a mobile version of the blog was launched. In 2012, the site will again be revised and some upcoming changes are summarized below.

1. Merger of huebler.info and huebler.blogspot.com

Until last year, I maintained two websites: the International Education Statistics blog at huebler.blogspot.com (Figure 1), and a separate website at huebler.info (Figure 2). The latter was mainly a mirror of articles posted on the blog, presented in a simpler format. For the reasons outlined below, I will close the site at huebler.info in the second quarter of 2012 and redirect all requests for huebler.info to huebler.blogspot.com. During the transition phase, new articles will only be posted on this blog.

Figure 1: Screenshot of huebler.blogspot.com


Figure 2: Screenshot of huebler.info


The simple site at huebler.info had one potential advantage: individual pages contained less HTML code and took less time to load on slow Internet connections. The blog at huebler.blogspot.com, on the other hand, offered several convenient features not available on the other site, including a site search and a labeling system, that make it easy to find content of interest. Perhaps because of this, the number of visitors to huebler.blogspot.com was far greater than the number of visitors to huebler.info.

Given the lack of features and the relatively low number of visitors of the current huebler.info site, I have decided to focus my efforts fully on the blog. If you currently have pages at huebler.info bookmarked, please replace those bookmarks by the relevant pages at huebler.blogspot.com; links to the latter are shown on the bottom of nearly every page at huebler.info. For example, a recent article on school attendance by grade and age in Liberia at http://huebler.info/2011/20110731-liberia.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/07/liberia.html. The guide to integrating Stata and external text editors at http://huebler.info/2008/20080427-stata.html can also be found at http://huebler.blogspot.com/2008/04/stata.html. After the shutdown of the current huebler.info site, all requests for huebler.info will lead to huebler.blogspot.com; any links to other huebler.info pages will seize to function. If you encounter a broken huebler.info link, please email me and I will send you the corresponding URL on the blog. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

2. New labeling system

All articles on the International Education Statistics blog are tagged with keywords or labels, listed at the bottom of each page, that can be used to find related articles. In May 2006, I began using Delicious to label and bookmark all posts. As an example, see this Delicious page with all articles about India on huebler.blogspot.com. In September 2011, after Delicious had been acquired by a new owner, the underlying software was modified and several features, including a tag cloud that I had used on my blog, were disabled. I therefore switched to the labeling system of Blogger. As an example, here is a link to all of my blog articles about India. I have not removed my bookmarks from Delicious but am no longer updating them.

3. Bigger images

The International Education Statistics blog is formatted to fit on displays with a width of 1024 pixels. To avoid overlap with the sidebar on the right of the page, tables and graphs were limited to a maximum width of about 650 pixels. Beginning in 2012, I will occasionally use images that can be enlarged. Below is an example from an article on School attendance by grade and age in Liberia of July 2011. The original graph had a fixed size and could not be enlarged. By contrast, clicking on the graph below will bring up a larger image that adjusts to the size of the display, up to a width of 1600 pixels.

Figure 3: Age distribution of pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia, 2007

Source: Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2007. - Click image to enlarge.

To summarize, I hope that these changes will make the International Education Statistics blog more user-friendly. If you encounter any problems with the revised design or if you have any other comments, please send me an email or post a comment below.

Friedrich Huebler, 31 January 2012 (edited 1 February 2012), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/01/website.html

Women write shorter presentations than men

That and other stats can be found in this presentation from Slideshare

SlideShare Zeitgeist 2011

View more presentations from Rashmi Sinha

Spotify has 3m paying subscribers

"Music subscription services may prove to be the saving grace for the recording industry. Three million people are now actively tuning in to Spotify, the song streaming platform once criticized for paying paltry royalties to record labels. Spotify has gained a million users since September, largely due to getting plugged into Facebook's social sharing."
Source:  Rolling Stone, 27th January 2012
Earlier - 2.5m in November

Mobile accounted for 42% of all technology investment in 2011

"Some revealing numbers out from the analysts at Rutberg & Co. that point to how big mobile is in terms of tech investments today, and how consumer applications are the source of the most action at the moment.
The analysts say that mobile investments accounted for 42.4 percent of all technology investment in 2011—or $6.3 billion for mobile startups in a year where, overall, venture capital investment in technology totaled $14.9 billion."

Source:  Paid Content, 23rd January 2012

Facebook contributes an estimated £2.2bn to UK GDP

"Facebook estimates that it benefits the UK to the tune of more than £2bn a year, including the development of an almost £500m "app economy" that has sprung up around the world's most popular social networking website.
The company commissioned a study by Deloitte, which concluded that Facebook supports 35,200 UK jobs and fuels £2.2bn to UK GDP each year, and published the document at the DLD conference in Munich on Tuesday.
Deloitte's estimates looked at the direct economic impact of Facebook – such as paying tax, profits and wages – as well as the more broad impact it has had in enabling businesses to reach customers, make sales, create and monetise apps and even boost demand for products such as broadband and smartphones."

Source:  The Guardian, 24th January 2012

5m guest reservations have been made on Airbnb

"Airbnb, the online marketplace where you can rent out your house or spare room to travelers, announced today it has reached a milestone of five million guest reservations overall. The company also celebrated its strong international growth, with property listings in more than 19,000 cities in 192 countries around the world.
In terms of reservations alone, 2011 was a great year for Airbnb. The company launched in 2008 and it took about three years to reach one million bookings. In the last year alone, more than four million reservations were made, bringing Airbnb’s total to a cool five million.
The company also brought in some serious funding in 2011. Last July, investors gave Airbnb $112 million at $1.3 billion valuation, bringing the company’s total funding to $119 million dollars.
[...]

The online listing and booking service is paying off for many in a big way; earlier this week we reported that New Yorkers are making an average of $21,000 per year by renting out their spaces to travelers. The legality of renting out spaces for short periods of time is questionable in some cities, but people have flocked to the service none the less."

Source:  VentureBeat, 26th January 2012

In December 2011 12% of paid search clicks in the UK came from mobile devices

"During December 2011, 12 percent of all paid search clicks in the UK were made either on a tablet or a smartphone, with 88% of all clicks originating from a desktop computer. This represents a 49% increase in mobile click share since October.
Share of search spend through December 2011 on smartphones and tablets represented a total of 7.5 percent whilst desktops clicks accounted for 92.5 percent of paid search spend.
The disparity between mobile click share (12 percent) and mobile spend share (7.5 percent) highlights favourable performance conditions for mobile advertisers. Relative to desktop search, volumes are growing faster than budgets, resulting in less expensive clicks on mobile campaigns.
Across all devices, paid search click volumes increased 43 percent, click-through rates (CTR) increased 24 percent and cost per click (CPC) decreased 5 percent during Q4 2011 on a year over year basis. The combination of improving CTRs and declining CPCs, point to significant efficiency gains for advertisers over the past year."

Source:  Data from Marin Software, reported in a press release, 19th January 2012