by Web Minister, September 1, 2002

August was a very disappointing month, mainly because we in the party were not able to pull together the various pieces needed to have a good offensive with the web page. I persynally have especially great responsibility for the failure. The good news is that the party has much more of its act together and the upcoming months should be very interesting for our web page.

Summary statistics comparing August 2001 and August 2002*

Mostly we are unhappy with these figures, because we want to break 100% annual growth in number of computers served.

This month we have come up with a ranking of departments based on how much they are generating further readership of the web page--not based on quantity of articles. (MIM Notes is still creating the largest totals in that category.)
1) Home page
2) Art page
3) Chinese page
4) Movies page
5) Black Panther page
6) What's New
7) FAQ
Something to note is how quickly the Chinese page moved up through the ranks. It is now generating more MIM traffic than the Black Panther page, despite the crackdown on the Internet in China caused by a fire at one Internet cafe. Something else the stats show is that it is a misconception to think that the position of a link on the home page determines a department's rank. The "Art" page is not even above the fold on our web page, but it is doing the second most work after the home page itself. MIM Notes web pages are set up so that people read the specific story they are looking for on a specific topic and then they leave the web page.

Aside from growth in Chinese, the "Matrix" resumed its traditional spot as most favorite movie review after being replaced by "Spiderman" a few months. Other statistics showed much of the usual pattern. There was scattered reading of the MIM Notes in a wide variety of stories. Amongst timeless stories, the big hit was the essay from Mao's China about Soviet literature in .pdf format with almost as much readership as our newest MIM Notes.

Another new trend is in the Amazon bookstore, where Mao finally surpassed the Black Panthers in terms of visitors MIM was sending to Amazon. Also increasing in interest were books by Stalin and about the Cultural Revolution.

Standard disclaimers:
1. The numbers in these reports are conservative estimates for a number of reasons.
a. The number of computer users refers to number of computers. The number of users could be higher or lower, because some computers serve pages to more than one individual, because individuals share computers and because conversely individuals use computers in more than one place.

b. The number of pages served should be thought of as a minimum, because statistics do not count re-readings or re-servings from local computer memory. Nor do they count sharing of pages once downloaded.

c. Most but not all graphics served are excluded from the figures to cut back on increasing "page" averages just by calling up various graphics.

2. Tracking where computers are from is bound to have some error as many wise users intentionally surf the web and leave a false trail. On the other hand, we doubt that such error means that non-U.$. readership is lower than reported, given that we do not count .com, .net and .edu readership.