You know you’re onto something when an overview of statistical display tools makes you send the video link to a group of friends. That was my reaction after I watched Hans Rosling’s 18-minute talk at the 2006 TED conference here.

Rosling is one of the founding members of Gapminder, a foundation based in Stockholm that bills itself as “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.” The statistics on the Gapminder site are, indeed, beautiful thanks to the presentation software, which allows you to track a multitude of indicators– from life expectancy and infant mortality rates to tax revenues and oil consumption per person– by country over time. Check out the site’s videos, as well. A good starting point is the clip “200 Years of History in 4.5 Minutes.”

Wired Magazine makes me think of wildly unreadable design and geeky articles in need of a gadget-loving friend’s translation abilities. But Wired offers an interesting array of blogs and one of them, Threat Level, focuses on the fast-moving subject of the Internet, technology, and privacy rights. Yes, some of the posts will make sense to only the most devoted lurker in cultish chatrooms, but categories like censorship, e-voting, privacy, the courts, and elections yield plenty of posts relevant to American government. One of the most recent, here, discusses an ACLU lawsuit against the Internet filtering policy of two school districts in Tennessee.

It’s rare to find a media blog that presents foreign policy updates, topical humor, and easily-digested chunks of analysis in a tone that appeals to students. Here’s Miguel Centellas’s take on Foreign Policy Magazine‘s official blog, Passport:

…very good, carefully vetted, but written in short bursts (and w/ a sometimes snarky tone) that works great for students.

Miguel, Soomo’s go-to comparativist for global politics resources, will be starting at the University of Mississippi in the fall and conducting research in Bolivia this summer. (Check out Miguel’s teaching blog here.) Consider this the first in a line of shout-outs thanking Miguel for sharing his ever-expanding list of resources with us.

Nearly six months after the breathless 24-hour media coverage ended, it turns out that turnout really was one of the most interesting aspects of the 2008 election: long-running turnout trends weren’t predictive and minority voters went to the polls in unprecedented numbers. Over at Pew, the article ”Dissecting the 2008 Electorate” begins,

The electorate in last year’s presidential election was the most racially and ethnically diverse in U.S. history, with nearly one-in-four votes cast by non-whites…

Pew’s article is an interesting overview and corrective to the long-term trends discussed in American Government texts. Of course, whether 2008 marks the beginning of something new or merely a blip in the data remains to be seen.