Happy 10th birthday to .id's blog!

Ten years ago, .id published our first blog. Glenn takes a look back at a decade of conversations about demographics, population forecasting, economics, housing and more.

Happy Birthday to .id’s blog!

We have been blogging about population demographics and economics for the past decade. It was 10 years ago today (23rd December 2010) that we published our first blog article. The goal of our blog was – and remains – to share our expertise and passion with as many as people as possible;  as part of our wider mission to contribute to the good society by helping organisations make informed decisions.

The topic of our very first blog “Should I use usual residence or enumerated data?”. This is a question we’re still asked today, though we – along with the ABS – have standardised our output to show usual residence as the default. The Census started collecting small area place of residence data in 2001, and we’ve gradually shifted with it to predominantly looking at information on where people live. However, the 2021 Census, like all previous Censuses, still primarily collects data on where people are on Census night and then adjusts back to place of usual residence. So this is certainly worth a re-read!

In this first blog post, you can also see a screenshot of one of our older Community Profile sites. We’ve come a long way since then, adding a lot of datasets and functionality –  but the basic format of the Community Profile remains. Its most enduring feature is to accompany each dataset with a comparison to an earlier time period and to a benchmark. This is called “Dominant–Emerging analsyis”, and is essential in converting raw data into knowledge. You can see how it works in this other early blog.

One of our most popular early blogs was “How to identify a gentrifying area?”, which looks at the indicators that show an area is getting too expensive for those who have rented there for some time, and what happens when higher socio-economic groups move in. The indicators are stil relevant today, though many of the suburbs identified in that article have now long since completed their gentrification process (and I don’t think anyone’s used the term “yuppies” for many years!). It’s a topic we look at more quantitively via the affordability analysis in our Housing Monitor (housing.id) tool.

A few stats on 10  years of the .id blog.

• We have published more than 830 blog articles.
• 2.6 million people have visited our blog since the beginning, with about 6.2 million page views.
• There are a total of 1,764 moderated comments on blog articles.
• Our most popular blog (by number of views) was  2018’s “The 50 largest cities and towns in Australia, by population”. We’ve done a series of these over the years, all of which have been well viewed. We try to avoid “clickbait”, but these ranked lists are very popular – as well as giving an insight into population distribution within Australia. Sometimes the simplest demographic characteristic (total population) can be the most important!
• Our most commented article was 2016’s “Answers to your Census queries and concerns”, all about questions being raised in the media at the time regarding the upcoming Census. Around Census time, a lot of people mistakenly think we are responsible for running the Census. (A few people even mistakenly sent their Census forms to us, which we dutifully forwarded on to the ABS!) However, we’re always happy to help out when people have questions about it.

Another feature of our blog over the years has been the fantastic cartoons which capture some of the more light-hearted elements of the trends we talk about. Shout out to our talented cartoonist Simon Kneebone, who has done more than 100 of these cartoons for us, and often whips them up at short notice with just a little information about the topic. Some of our favourites:

Here’s to another 10 years! If there is anything you would like to see us talk about on the blog, please drop us a line info@id.com.au.