Gapminder Desktop has been released and it is free.  Now you can do the same kind of graphs that Hans Rosling does in his amazing TED talks (see here and here).

I’ve been playing with it this morning and I find it captivating. Perhaps that just shows that I’m a data geek.

This is a great example of intermediaries (in this case, Google) creating applications that people can actually use, based on raw data published by government.  Governments and international institutions could never do something like this.  That is why they should focus on liberating the data, in a free, open, standardised way, so that more applications like this can be developed.