Due to ongoing growth, we are now hiring for full time web developers. If you'd like to work on NationMaster and other free research sites, we would love to hear from you.

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.

Our undying mission is to make our stats as accessible as possible, no easy task when there's over 8000 of them.

So that's why we've recently been paying a lot of attention to search. We've just unveiled an update that finds what you're after, more quickly and more accurately than ever before.

It might look the same but inside it's much smarter. Give it a go! Top center of every page.

Feedback always welcome.

Luke.

Our forums are now back online. Apologies to our regular users for both the initial deluge and the resulting downtime. And to new users, we again have a place for discussing global issues and asking the advice of your fellow NMers.

Also, we're recognising that as the site grows, it's getting harder to get to your stats. So we've been making some changes. Some of these have already gone live like showing the top 20 stats in categories. That's the default but we're not walking away from our mission of being the one-stop shop for stats. By clicking the "All" tab you can still get the full list.

Luke.

After much hard work, we can announce one of our biggest ever new features; literally a whole new dimension for NationMaster.

Now you can walk back in time.

Here's how it works. Take a newly updated stat like number of telephone subscribers.

1. Select a year from the drop down box and the variable for that year. This shows all countries for the given year.

2. Click on the "..." to the right of the date for a particular country name. This brings up the country's value for the stat over time eg look at the growth in telephone subscribers over time in China. Or check out the growth in personal computers in the United States.

This is only available for newly added stats but there's certainly a lot of them to digest. We hope you like them.