by Web Minister, March 3, 2002

February was a breakthrough month for the MIM web page. Propelled by the art, movies and especially the Black Panther page, MIM's web page set convincing records for number of users. Despite February's only having 28 days and despite web site outages, the web page set a record for number of users since we started using the analytical means of counting that we use now. (It's possible that years ago web traffic was higher at some point, but we did not use the same means to measure it.)

MIM developers have often speculated on the nature of the computers using our site. Concerns that MIM's web page has to stay simple because of international readership and varying technologies received a boost in analysis this month: 2nd place behind Windows for favorite operating system is unknown. Meanwhile Windows users outnumber logged Unix users 50:1. Macintosh faired better relative to Windows at 16:1.

Another point of interest is that the leading source of MIM's traffic from web engines comes via the Black Panther page. In fact, February was the first time that the Black Panther page was the most popular page of the whole web site, more popular than the home page or MIM Notes.

More surprisingly is that another leading search term ending up bringing people to MIM is "XXX," which we surmise to mean that MIM's web page benefits from pornography related traffic even more directly than we would have imagined. Other important words are "Maoist," "Mao," "imperialism," "Philippines" and "Huey." Nonetheless, none of these words accounts for more than 2% of the reasons people come to the MIM web page from search engines, which we hope is a sign of the diverse readership topics we cover.

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

Summary statistics comparing February 2001 and February 2002

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

Web page department	February 2001 hits	February 2002 hits	% change
MIM Notes	5055	4508 (old system) + (196 + 44)=4748*	-6.1%
Home page	2661	3649	+37.1%
Black Panther page	2576	4553	+76.7%
Whatsnew	847	854	+0.8%
Art	822	2996	+264%
What is MIM?	481	691	+43.7%

*We have discontinued the old way of serving MIM Notes and statistics are now adjusted for that fact.

Since the above table focuses on what was popular a year ago, what it does not show is the changing composition of MIM web page readership. The movies page showed a six-fold growth from February a year ago.

This past month, readers downloaded 63 .zip files.

The most popular Afghanistan-related story in December 2001 for the fourth month in a row was our story mourning the September 11th victims translated into Chinese with 45 hits.

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.

No particular news story jumped out to grab readers and back issue readership was very strong. No doubt this has to do with the fact that I posted no new MIM Notes material.

Spotlight MIM Notes

There were 419 hits on the "Myths of Mao" and as before there were over 300 hits each on many Black Panther and Tiananmen related articles. One wrinkle for last month was the 390 hits on the environmental section of the old version bookstore.

Story name	# of hits
Black Panther May 31, 1969	106
Zapatistas	97
Panama y los Yanquis	66
Black Panthers Nov 16 1968	59
/nr/imni.html	47

Having watched web statistics for some years, as Web Minister, I will predict that the Chinese and music pages will see the most expansion in upcoming years--in addition to current favorites of the Black Panther Party, art and movies. An area of work that needs to be resumed is radio, which could also see a large expansion.