Resource of the Week: More Niche Statistics
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
OK, it's numbers round-up time again -- something I'm prone to do when unearthed a bunch of new statistical resources. I collect these the way other people collect stamps, coins or baseball cards. Vetted sources of statistical information are always useful for The Day Job. And please...if you have a few favorites, please let us know so we can share widely.
Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. I put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.
Owyang, an analyst for Forrester, says he will be updating this information throughout the year.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produces Economy at a Glance pages at the national, regional, state, and metropolitan area levels. The data displayed in these pages are assembled from different surveys and programs conducted by BLS. The Economy at a Glance pages are refreshed with current data every time any of the source programs releases new statistics. This typically occurs 7-9 times per month.
+ Tax Statistics (Produced by the Statistics of Income Division and Other Areas of the Internal Revenue Service)
Categories include business tax statistics, individual tax statistics, IRS operations/budget/compliance, statistics of income, charitable and exempt organization statistics, products/publications/papers, statistics by tax form, and more. The What's New page points to the most recent information added to the site and also to the most popular items. If you want to be alerted when new statistics are posted, you can subscribe to the Tax Stats Dispatch e-mail list.
This page contains statistics on fires that occur in the United States and analytical and topical reports that describe the national fire problem. Also included are statistics related to firefighters and fire departments.
The U.S. Fire Administration is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
This page contains credit card-related statistics -- including statistics on credit card debt, credit card delinquencies, credit scores, credit card interest rates, bankruptcies, average credit card debt and more -- compiled by the CreditCards.com staff. Statistics on this page will be updated regularly as we receive new or updated credit card data. Some data may appear multiple times on the page because the information is applicable in multiple categories.
CreditCards.com is an established online credit card marketplace that partners with a number of reliable media outlets such as Forbes.com, bizjournals.com, and Forbes.com. Read more about the site here (PDF; 36 KB).
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
