Summary statistics comparing January 2002 and January 2003

January 2003 ended up having an operational plan that would make it by far the biggest month in MIM history in all combined public opinion building. Thanks to some breakdowns in the plan regarding things being done for the first time, January 2003 ended up being only a record month, not a real breakthrough type of month. On the plus side, the many decent people demonstrating against the war in Iraq boosted our circulation beyond what was in the plan.

One thing I would point out about the table above is that it shows that almost 100 pages went out to the public every single hour of every day on average.

Because I was not happy with my report for last month, I did some more research this month on the question of slowing readership growth. I'm still in the process of looking at some leads into the question, to see if there is something very basic that I am missing from the picture. At the very least, I thought this month I would break down the results more to see if there were some departments that were growing better than 100% while others lagged. So for the first time, we break down departments into "movers & shakers," "pulling their weight" and "laggards."

In effect, some departments of the web page are not growing anymore, because there is not much development interest in them. Other departments like Chinese have done a stupendous job developing but suffered a sudden loss of interest a few months ago for reasons that are not entirely clear but which must involve someone with a great deal of social, economic or political power somewhere.

This month I will take credit in two areas where I have recently taken some lumps. Our prison circulation is back on track and in many ways doing better than ever before. Though uneven, our print circulation is also at record levels. We are definitely back to the problem of not having enough money instead of having circulation bottlenecks and that's the way it should be. I suspect some of January's gains will not show up in statistics until February.

January was a big month in terms of proving to our web page developers their effectiveness; even though overall growth figures would not seem to prove it. While I was uploading a movie review--before it had been done and advertised in "What's New," someone read it, reviewed it on his web page and criticized it for spelling errors present in one version but not the final version up on the web page. That's how closely people are watching the movie reviews page.

I was also in the position to put up a document that didn't seem particularly special that quickly received over 800 hits. Seeing things like that happen make it difficult to turn away from web development work. The fact that the impact of developers can be seen should remind us that our growth figures are relative to ourselves--relative to our own past development efforts. It's not that we are having no impact, but to grow we have to surpass what we ourselves did before.

Web traffic broken down by department

The above table counts the languages all the same way, based on number of visitors. It reveals that Spanish is now language number two, French third and Chinese fourth for our web page.

Top five movie reviews

Movie review	# times requested
Spiderman	333
Lord of the Rings: II	250
Matrix	141
Black Hawk	118
Bugs Life	100

Appendix on counting methods