by Web Minister, February 1, 2002

In January, 2002, MIM added web pages in Italian and Swedish. As last month, foreign languages continued to be a bright spot for the web page, in addition to growth in art and Black Panther history seekers.

The most popular time to read was midnight Sundays in January 2002. It's not how it was in January 2001, but at that time, the composition of MIM Notes readers was probably much different. In January, 2001 a very large contingent of Taiwanese studied the website, more than doubling the Amerikkkan .edu readership. From this we can see that the reason the favorite time to read MIM's web site seems to change so much is the composition of readers and the difference in time zones.

Countries getting at least 150 pages from the MIM web site in January, 2001

Summary statistics comparing January 2001 and January 2002

January 2002 Percentage Change from Previous Year in Top 6 January, 2001 Departments

Web page department	January 2001 hits	January 2002 hits	% change
MIM Notes	10,379	4454*	-57.1%
Home page	2879	3731	+29.6%
Black Panther page	1571	2904	+84.9%
Whatsnew	815	878	+7.7%
Art	801	2585	+223%
Movies	712	821	+15.3%

*January 2001 had stupendous MIM Notes readership, especially in the back issues. January 2002 by comparison seems to be a drastic fall. In actual fact, the readership of the top January 2002 MIM Notes was almost double that of the January 2001, but January 2001 had so much back issue reading going on that the total figure was higher in 2001. We will not be using the same method of counting MIM Notes readership in the future, because we have discontinued the number submitter using .php scripts.

This past month, readers downloaded 45 .zip files compared with none a year ago, but total megabytes transferred was still higher in 2001, only because of very heavy readership of old MIM Notes in 2001 as far as we can see. The most popular Afghanistan-related story in December 2001 for the third month in a row was our story mourning the September 11th victims translated into Chinese with 58 hits. In second place with 27 hits was our story about the CIA and President raising a ruckus over "treason."

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.

This past month, non-Afghanistan stories finally took over in reader interest. The leading story was our attempt to interview the Los Angeles Times about Stalin with 162 hits. Next was our story on China's calling the People's War in Nepal "terrorist" with 64 hits in English.

Spotlight MIM Notes

With regard to serious at length theory articles on the web page, there was some shift of interest discernible in January. "What is MIM" reading went down as did "Three points" reading, but there were 247 hits on the endnotes to "Imperialism and Its Class Structure in 1997." Various chapters had barely over 20 hits while other chapters ranged up to 73 hits.

There 349 hits on the "Myths of Mao" and there was very strong interest in Tiananmen related stories in English and Chinese.

Of note to techie-minded people, the shakeup at the bookstore has not produced an immediate benefit in book review/book purchases. The bands "Bane" and "Tool" did seem to benefit from having our reviews of them broken out. On the whole though, the work that has gone into the bookstore has yet to show serious fruit in terms of numbers of hits.

Story name	# of hits
"Panama y los yanquis"	121
Black Panther May 31, 1969	106
Zapatistas	91
Black Panthers Nov 16 1968	68
Four Centuries of Resistance by Jose Maria Sison	58