by Web Minister, October 1, 2002

I'm running this report on the last 20 days of September, because I did not know what to expect in comparison with a year ago after September 11th. Thanks to all your efforts the last 20 days of September, 2002 showed great growth in building public opinion since a year ago. We did not double our traffic from a year ago after September 11th, but that was probably unrealistic to expect. Hopefully in the months ahead we will see a return to 100% annual growth in visitors to our website.

Summary statistics comparing last 20 days of September 2001 and September 2002*

Immediately after September 11th last year, we had new articles on the web site daily. It appears to explain why this year our increase in pages read is so low. Also, last year there were no .zip files to speak of. Next month we will expect to see the start of a decrease in growth in megabytes people download. This month, one persyn downloaded the whole website for 10.6% of total megabytes, but even if we exclude that, megabytes transferred still almost tripled from a year ago.

The hot thing for September, 2002 was four posters, especially those of San Francisco RAIL--"Fighting Imperialism is NOT terrorism," Sharon as Bush's puppet, Iraq and a criticism of the Amerikkkan majority. These posters received 423, 401, 385 and 340 hits respectively. In contrast, the most read article on the website was about Tiananmen in Chinese with 305 hits.

Even more importantly, people around the world put these posters to use. Two places that people might not have guessed include both Hong Kong and Vietnam. It is evident that the posters fill a crying need. It's also an important lesson that there are good reasons to have a division of labor. Not everyone should do the same thing in the revolutionary movement and we have to bravely face the fact that the impact of a struggle is not always known in advance, so we should stop using as an excuse the fact of not having everything placed under our noses. Those of us who know they do not think this way should make a point of following leaders who look into the future.

There is no way that I the Web Minister could have told anyone that the new thing in September 2002 was going to be posters and that people talked more about those than our other articles on the website. Yes, some people were making an effort with posters and I knew that, but they have in the past as well without being the most noticeable project in the web statistics. So we have to understand it is also efforts by people I have never met that show up in our statistics! That is always true in our struggle--that we only see a portion of the impact of our work.

So when people considering revolutionary action ask themselves, "what difference is it going to make?" they should ask themselves whether they have convinced themselves about what History requires at this moment in order for the humyn species to go forward. If something is necessary, in a broadly social way, an action will make a difference. Someone could have said, "oh, it's just another poster," and never made them. Clearly, these posters we are talking about in September 2002 are not "just another poster." People around the world felt they served a need.

That does not mean just any poster would do. For this reason, people should focus their work with MIM in areas that they are relatively or extremely good in while they also seek to round themselves out and become expert in many areas. We also need to block any false egalitarianism that says everyone should do the same thing for the revolution so that there does not have to be a structure to bring all the work together. Modern society is complex and will only get more complex in the foreseeable future.

One of the reasons false egalitarianism arises is that some people wishing to have an excuse to abandon revolutionary activity and lacking a scientific outlook play what we at MIM have called "invidious comparisons." These are the kind of comparisons when even if they exist in reality do nothing to bring about advance, because the conclusions to be drawn apply to two people instead of classes. What is important is not that we all do the same thing but that we each challenge ourselves and do the most we can relative to ourselves to bring about revolution. When we compare individuals like Gandhi and Mao we do so to compare broad strategies and roads, certainly not to comment specifically on whether this or that one spent more of his/her waking hours on his/her movement. This becomes very clear in talking about art. The posters we have are well-done. There is no real way to compare the work of the revolutionary artist to the work of revolutionary web worker or the editor or the biggest distributor etc. Hence, people who hinge their own thought on such comparisons are being too narrow.

A very young and inexperienced persyn in school might just copy the revolutionary movement as a way of starting. Someone might see a petition for imprisoned Turkish journalist Memik Horroz and simply collect signatures for the petition, because they saw someone else doing it. There is nothing wrong with that. Yet, as revolutionaries hopefully develop, they face questions of what areas to work in. A communist must have an all-conquering attitude, but even people who are not communists and know they are not communists should wrack their brains to utilize their advantages.

Something I have observed a long time now in the web page statistics is that art and new technical forms are popular, more than say the exactly referenced quotes on our Classics page for instance. Web page visitors took 839 .mp3s and 314 .ra files in the last 20 days of September, 2002. Hence, if you read my web page reports and sought merely to copy what I do, you would make a big mistake, because I have not done any work selecting .mp3s. If you know a revolutionary band with an .mp3 to release on MIM's website, you have already made a big mistake in not seeing it get done!

In fact, in the past 20 days, there was less than a 10% difference between interest in the Art page and interest in the MIM home page itself. On my computer, and I'm sure on many other peoples' computers, the Art page is not even a link "above the fold" on the home page. I cannot see it when I go to the home page for MIM. The reason for that is that my own efforts to influence direction and flow of traffic are nothing compared with people's own tastes and the search engines that direct them. Although far from the home page, the Massachusetts page shows that people took one radio program only 9 times less than all pages read in the recent MIM Notes 265. Again, our assumption would be that since MIM Notes is more up-to-date and because there is a special link for it on the home page, and because it is not only for Massachusetts, it would be far more read than the radio program. However, this example goes to show that people want what they want. Art and technological format do matter hugely.

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.