Summary statistics comparing December 2001 and December 2002

December 2002 was another disappointing month for our central task. This month I will not claim to know what is happening. The only obvious answer is that our print circulation is not growing fast enough to keep our web traffic growing fast enough, but I am far less certain of what is happening than in past months. Hopefully future months will shed some light on what the problem is.

This month I take blame for two negative aspects of the report. One is that prison circulation is down from a year ago. Two, is that our growth rate in computer users of our web page also declined. This past year we have been instituting a number of changes that should make MIM performance better, but we are still suffering major growing pains especially in connection to prisoners.

On the bright side, there were a number of quirky results that were very positive and belied the result for the month. We finally implemented our first texts in Japanese and Korean. They were a long time coming. Many people are stepping forward with interest in translating, probably some just spies who are not serious. Time will tell if we are able to consolidate some more language advances.

Sometimes we put up new material without reporting it in "What's New." This month we squeezed in a review of "Lord of the Rings: Twin Towers" at the end and it is a good thing, because it ended up leading the monthly movie review traffic with 172 hits despite being up less than a week.

Top five movie reviews

Movie review	# times requested
Lord of the Rings: II	172
Matrix	133
Black Hawk Down	125
Spiderman 2002	97
Star Wars Attack of the Clones	89

The fact that "Star Wars" just beat out "Star Trek: Nemesis" for readers shows that it's not always a question of being recent. The big box office hits are the ones people are reading, so it's important to send those reviews in. Surely some amongst us have seen the "Harry Potter" films and can send in some reviews. If "Harry Potter" is all just fantasy escapism like the trailers seem to indicate, the "Lord of the Rings" review can serve as a model.

It is what we call an "ultraleft" error to disdain box office hits that are utterly stupid and not deign to review them. In situations where workers are exploited, they learn from communists in trade union struggles partly because they share a common experience with those communist organizers as the struggle happens. Workers come to know how communists regard something that workers know about for sure. While most people are still coming to MIM's web page for answers to historical questions that they did not experience directly, movies offer a chance for a shared experience--giving people experience with communists on something they know concretely, a movie that the people and the communists have both seen.

WIth regard to various results, this month, the home page, movies page, art page and Black Panther page were all in the 3000 to 4000 hits category. Once again, the lesson is that art and graphics are important as are technical formats. The average web file found on the web page received over 15 hits this month. The fact that there are over 4000 or 5000 files to choose from is a credit to the developers who keep bringing in new content.

The agitation page had only 193 visitors. However, it appears that the agitation prisons page serves as an entry point for some people to the MIM web page. Oddly enough, people visit and then leave their agitation pages, in 227 cases on the agitation page's prison campaigns page alone and 219 cases on the prison "censor.html" page. That's usually what we would expect when such a page is serving as a home page.

There were 90 hits on the Philippines agitation .html page, and 51 hits on our page for Turkish journalist Memik H. The two most popular Joma Sison .mp3s had 25 and 20 hits respectively. However, based on experience with .mp3s, we expect that those numbers will rise and stay steady over time.

The RAIL home page had 351 visitors. There were 198 hits on the "rail.html," 172 hits on the RAIL flliers page, 99 hits on DC RAIL, 86 hits on "What is RAIL?" 75 hits on "RAIL campaigns," 57 hits on the RAIL terror.html, 80 visitors to Philadelphia RAIL, 118 visitors to the California page, 206 pages read of the bandgcal .pdf, 56 readings of gramterla.pdf, 49 readings of obesity.pdf, 48 readings of goodamlax.pdf, 47 readings of dubois.pdf and 44 readings of the notterroirsm.pdf, just to mention the most read RAIL fliers.

Another bright spot is the increasing attention to our bookstore. We had 207 hits on our classics of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao page, 193 hits on our "A Civil Action" review, 145 hits on our Vietnam War review of Kinnard, 142 hits on our Black Book of Communism review, 98 hits on our review of Roderick MacFarquhar's book on the Great Leap in China and 83 hits on our review of Duiker's biography of Ho Chi Minh, just to name the most popular reviews.

Languages

Although our Chinese readership is down quite a bit since a year ago, it is likely that the number of visitors makes Chinese the second-most read language after English on our web page. The Spanish and Chinese web page are structured differently technically-speaking, so no direct comparison is possible. The most popular Spanish article had 105 hits while the Chinese web page had 192 on its most popular article. It appears that that difference goes down the line.

Top five theory articles by number of times requested

Theory article	# times requested
DC Murder	559
Myths of Mao	407
What Is MIM?	298
Prison labor MT article	265
Fascism defined Congress resolution	251

Appendix on counting methods