by Web Minister, January 1, 2002

In December, 2001, MIM initiated web page publication in Portuguese, Finnish and Polish. Foreign languages continued to be a bright spot for the web page, in addition to growth in art and Black Panther history seekers.

Before I list information for December, 2001 and how it compared with December 2000, I will explain a little about the nature of the 2000 statistics. The most popular time to read in December, 2001 was noon and 10pm and Saturdays. In December, 2000, just under 5.6% of our traffic came from ".edu" domains. The leading referrer that month was a company called Earthlink. Inktomi fell to fourth place after being first place in November.

Countries getting at least 100 pages from the MIM web site in December, 2000

Summary statistics comparing December 2000 and December 2001

Usage of MIM's web site is different this year, because we have a page specializing on the war in Afghanistan, which takes much traffic that used to go to the MIM Notes web page. To understand how we compare with how the web page was set up a year ago, I prepared the following table that has the potential to show any regressing areas of our work. This month, even if we combine MIM Notes and the Afghanistan page, readership of MIM Notes is still down from a year ago.

December 2001 Percentage Change from Previous Year in Top 6 December, 2000 Departments

Web page department	December 2000 hits	December 2001 hits	% change
MIM Notes	7134	3214	-54.9%
Home page	2798	4824	+42.0%
Black Panther page	1198	2141	+78.7%
Art	876	2363	+169.7%
Whats New?	863	867	+0.5%
Movies	675	892	+32.1%

The most popular Afghanistan-related story in December 2001 for the second month in a row was our story mourning the September 11th victims translated into Chinese with 80 hits. In second place with 61 hits was our story about the CIA and President raising a ruckus over "treason." Third place with 49 hits went to our copy of the Asia Times story on U.$. war threats to Afghanistan over a proposed oil pipeline prior to September 11th.

At this time I'd also like to remind readers that as in past months these statistics include my own reading of the web page. Hence, I'd discount home page readings by 300 hits for the hits just by people developing it and I'd also discount the World Trade Center story hits at 3 hits per story, because those hits are just those of the developers, and not the public.

No article in MIM Notes outside of Afghanistan-related stories garnered more than 33 hits. That includes back issues.

Spotlight MIM Notes

Web page department	Number of visits
Home page	4824
MIM Notes	3214
Art	2363
Black Panther collection	2141
September 11th/Afghanistan text files only	2093
Movies	892
What is MIM?	859
Chinese language page	743
Classic Quotes and Controversies	609
Myths of Mao article	434
Notas Rojas	384
usprogressintheme.ra (Radio show)	324
DC murder article	317
FAQ	312
Misplaced Attica article	311
What's Your Line?	282
What is MIM?	280
Three points	258
California "bandgcal.pdf"	257

Although December is generally a slower web traffic month for us than November, our foreign language pages all showed dramatic increases. 1) The Finnish page debuted with 149 hits in December. 2) The Russian page had 141 hits. 3) The French page had 165 hits. 4) German had 134 hits. 5) Portuguese had 111 hits--with 23 hits on "about MIM" and 22 hits on "Three Points." 6) Although the Polish page started at the very end of the month, it had 77 hits.

Story name	# of hits
"Panama y los yanquis"	113
Zapatistas	75
Black Panther article 16nov68	75
"What is MIM?"	73
"Callao & Yanamayo" (El Diario Internacional)	50
"New restrictions on immigration"	49
Four Centuries of Resistance by Jose Maria Sison	49
PCP anniversary	44

Overall, despite some decline in MIM Notes readership, it was a very encouraging month for the web page. Foreign languages showed very strong readership and some of the more serious theory articles did as well. For example, there were 240 hits on the theory article on the Black Panthers' newspaper and 90 hits on one chapter of "Imperialism and Its Class Structure in 1997." MIM's reviews of the "RCP-USA" were also popular as were some serious articles from and about the Filipino comrades.