This Blog’s Top Posts for 2009

As I am almost ready to resume winding down this blog, as I keep promising to do soon, here is a sample of what 2009 looked like on this blog, in terms of the ten most viewed essays. Unfortunately it seems that WordPress only counts on-site page views, when posts viewed by various feed readers are usually twice to three times as many in this blog’s case. The total number of on-site views for this blog, since its inception on 11 October 2007, stands at 307,653 as of this moment.

1. America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution – 6,200
2. M. Jamil Hanifi: Engineering Division, Instability, and Regime Change with Naheed, Neda, and Allah – 5,693
3. The Unreported Death of Staff Sgt. Paula Loyd of the Human Terrain System: Third Researcher to Die – 4,775
4. Some Breaking News on the Human Terrain System: Death Threats Against Female Colleagues – 4,378
5. A Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava, May He Poop on My Knee: Cross-Cultural Translation Under Conditions of Contemporary Electronic Globalization – 1,928
6. Frantz Fanon: “Concerning Violence” – 1,912
7. Whitewashing a U.S. War Crime in Afghanistan: The Trial of Don Ayala, “Human Terrain” Mercenary – 1,712
8. Anthropologist Under Attack: University of East London Punishes Chris Knight Over His Public Speech – 1,368
9. The Deafening Silence of the “Milbloggers”: Inconvenient Truths? – 1,290
10. Professor Richard Antoun, murdered Fri. Dec. 4, 2009: We Will Miss You, May God Bless You – 1,164

The top search terms in 2009 that brought readers to this blog were:

1. paula loyd – 4,730
2. open anthropology – 2,330
3. idi amin – 2,181
4. national geographic – 1,506
5. human terrain system – 1,279
6. national geographic photos – 830
7. don ayala – 716
8. benny lava – 707
9. gaza live cam – 637
10. shelby lee adams – 542

I think some of the best posts remain for the end of this blog, although, as is often the case, what I think is the best and what viewers find most interesting often differ considerably.

I will have a more complete roundup of the statistics for the cluster of sites that formed part of the Open Anthropology Project, at the close of this blog.