The 2008 Beijing Olympics has just finished. So who did the best?

Well if you believe NBCOlympics, it’s the US with 110 medals.

But that’s absurd, right? China won almost everything, achieving 51 gold medals to just 36 by the States.

If we count a gold medal as three points, silver as two and bronze as one, we have China with 223 points just scraping past the US with 220.

Though if you ask me, you should not only weight medals by value, but also normalize according to population and GDP. When you do so, you see the Bahamas had the greatest success at the Beijing Olympics with an impressive 1267.2 points per million people per trillion dollars GDP! By that standard, the US comes in at 83 out of 88 medal-winning countries and China at 86!

I threw together a bit of actionscript so you can see how the rankings move around with this normalization (if you are using a feed reader you will need to click through):

Some interesting results, yes? Bahamas clearly ahead. Caribbean countries and Western Ex-Soviet Republics very well represented (for obvious reasons really). Australia high once again on the population-normalized chart but dropping away when GDP is considered.

A note on units:

When normalized by population, you are seeing the number of medals or points per million in population. When normalized by GDP, it is the number of medals or points per trillion dollars of GDP (not GDP per capita). So with both selected, we have medals or points per million people per trillion dollars of GDP.

Hope you enjoy!

Oh and if you want to do your own work on this, feel free to download the xml file I used.

UPDATE: Graham points out that some of the text is disappearing in IE7. If this is the case for you, try looking at the table in isolation.

This one’s a bit of a usability design in-joke.

I’ve made a WordPress theme based on the site design of web usability expert Dr. Jakob Nielsen. For those who don’t know, Jakob’s success and committed following have shielded him from the last 10 or so years of developments in web design. His site is a time-machine to 1995, and while perfectly accessible has attracted some justifiable criticism for its nauseating design.

Creating the Jakobian WordPress theme was actually a fun exercise - it’s not every day that you get to go under the hood of such an ancient site.

If for some reason you actually want to use Jakobian, you can download it here.

As you can tell from the entirely un-sexy title, this is one for the analytics nerds.

Google Insights provides the interesting capability of viewing the relative search volume of keywords mapped to a geography. So for instance, Andrew Chen has used the tool to identify websites used by early adopters. This is handy both directly for web strategy, as well as indirectly as a proxy for spread of usage.

One feature that’s missing though is a quantitative measure of spread. I want to know, for instance, the degree of usage of TechCrunch relative to the NYT. Or of my new startup compared to established competitors. Or of a US brand compared to a competing European brand. And I want it in numbers.

For this, you need to take the CSV dump from Google Insights and take the standard deviation of the values for the “top regions for [keyword]” with some adjustments due to the dorky way that Google gives you data.

Or if you don’t want to do that, you could just plug your CSV files into the geographic spread calculator that I threw together this morning.

Here are some fun queries I prepared earlier:

• Obama vs McCain internationally
• Obama vs McCain in the US
• Top social networks
• Australian print newspapers
• “Olympic swimming” vs “South Ossetia”

Have fun, and let me know if you come up with anything interesting!

I’m feeling generous.

The Headless WordPress theme is clean, pixel-perfect, and grid-based. It values content above anything else, so the usual ‘header’ material is placed at the bottom, leaving more content above the fold. It’s also free for you to download and use (in accordance with license details provided in readme.txt).

The default markup is generally retained, with the grid layout achieved through conventional css (not a framework). It has been tested on standards-compliant browsers on WordPress versions 2.5 and 2.6.

This isn’t for everyone - but if your readers value clean, elegant and functional design, then it may be for you.

Download from WordPress Extend.

Hope you enjoy it!