There have been a lot of ways to present data and compare them amongst different countries.
Gapminder, the toy for world visualizers, is by far the most dynamic I’ve seen. With it, you will be able to choose the different indicators you want to visualize and set it to be either the X-axis or the Y axis. You can also set the colors of the different countries based on a third indicator in addition to those you picked for the x and y axis.
In this diagram, I set the x-axis to be the income per capita and the y-axis to be the number of internet users per 1000 in the population. There seems to be a linear correlation between these two factors. As income per capita increases, the number of internet users also increase. I chose to highlight the countries I’ve visited.
Among them, the outliers seem to be Malaysia and Ireland. Ireland has few internet users relative to its income per capita. I would tend to accept this data as it is on one glance because the short visit I had to Ireland always gave me an old city feel with all those classic buildings and old brick houses–and the faulty assumption that ICT infrastructure in this country is not so good. It surprised me that Wikipedia states that Ireland is one of the largest exporters of software-related goods in the world. Intuitively, I’d expect this to correlate with an increase in internet usage but this is not what the graph reflects when viewed on year 2004. However, since gapminder is able to present the data as a trail relative to the year, I noted that it was rather the income per capita which was exceptional in Ireland. Most countries (like the United States, Philippines, Malaysia) have very vertical graphs and thus very little increase in income per capita from 1995-2004. This is not the case for Ireland, whose remarkable development in 1995 and more so when they joined the EU in 1999, reflects a more horizontal graph from 1995-2004. If this had been a more vertical graph, Ireland would easily fit into the linear correlation. (My conclusion: Ireland is really an interesting case study on the effect of joining the EU 
hehehe )
On the other hand, Malaysia has a lot of internet users relative to its income per capita. This data might be reflected in the strong ICT in the country. If you look at the world’s most popular ICT areas, Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor is along the lines of US’ Silicon Valley. Even in a paper by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 2005 by Jomo KS, increase in electronics exports (which may be reflective of the strength of the ICT industry) was one of the most significant reasons for the remarkable recovery of Malaysia relative to its neighbors from the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997.
So try Gapminder and play with the different indicators. You can find it at www.gapminder.org ! Fun fun fun! Personally, I use it as a start-off point to learn about different countries. If something in the graphs interest me, I go read more about these particular aspects. Fun fun fun!
What I would like to see in this resource is an angle of collaboration from the different sectors. This will be possible if there is capability for users to plug in values for other set indicators outside of what is already in the resource(life expectancy, physicians, military budget, fertility rate). Let’s say a particular organization does research on child labor and they have figures from around the world. It would be good if they could send these data to Gapminder along with let’s say a paper or a methodology of how they got such data.
Also, for those who want to do more extensive analysis, it might be good if we could get links to the sources of these data (so we’ll know about the methods used to arrive at such) and if we could extract the actual figures behind the graph. For example, with my graph above, with the figures available let’s say in an excel file… I could do personal calculations like the correlation coefficient given the 2 indicators I chose to be able to determine if there is in fact linear correlation between the two.
