Powerful tools for social research

Graham questions the value of blog statistics, he says its better to listen to people. Arti questions why we measure at all. Though we can waste a lot of time with vanity statistics, now that we are electronically interconnected, we can do research that previously seemed impossible. On insufficient data, I have analysed the national interest in game programming using Clustermaps and Google Trends, with questionable accuracy I can say that Australia is a world leader in educational use of game programming.

See http://www.blogviz.com/blogviz/ for a statistical analysis of the transmission of memes.

There was a study which looked at guild size in MMOG's like World of Warcraft to test Dunbar's theories of human organisation.

Yes I spend too much time massaging my ego looking at my cluster map and Googling myself, but we have a powerful research tool there too.

Interest in game programming by country

Here is an analysis of the interest in the educational use of computer game programming by country using Clustrmaps http://clustrmaps.com

	total	Australia	UK&Ireland	USA
Pop million		20	60	283
http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au/gamemaker/default.htm	8780	3070	550	6640
hits/million pop			9	23
http://www.freewebs.com/schoolgamemaker/	887	765	55	575
hits/million pop			0.9	2.0
http://www.gamelearning.net/	2955	270	550	1405
hits/million pop		13.5		5.0

It is obvious that you cannot use a site's map to gauge relative interest in a topic in its host country, there's a strong "home town" effect. It is interesting that the 2 Australian sites both found that interest per capita was twice as high in USA as UK. Then, based on one site, Australian interest per capita was almost 3 times as high as USA.

Another analysis can be done with http://www.google.com/trends . Note that statistics for search terms are normalised on a % of searches basis. If a city rates highly its not because it has more searches of that term but that term is more likely to be used in its total of searches.

Search gamemaker:

1.	Brisbane Australia
2.	Amsterdam Netherlands
3.	Adelaide Australia
4.	Perth Australia
5.	Auckland New Zealand
6.	Melbourne Australia
7.	Stockholm Sweden
8.	Sydney Australia
9.	Helsinki Finland
10.	Seattle, WA USA

Note that Estonia wins on a per country basis and Australia comes third (I dont understand)

Australian cities, notably Brisbane win on Constructivism, Metacognition and Pedagogy. Interestingly if you search instruction or instructional, USA fills all 10 top places but for instructional design, India wins.

I also had fun with war/peace, love/hate etc. Its also fun to look at time trends