Another year gone, and time to reflect back on a turbulent 2006. Every year seems to bring a different flavor to Imagethief. If 2004 was the wide-eyed beginnings and 2005 was hitting its stride, 2006 was the year it settled into some kind of maturity. Imagethief seems to have established itself as one of "the" China blogs, and I'm pretty happy about that and grateful for all the support. RSS subscriptions went up substantially, especially in the latter half of the year, and the bar for what constituted a widely-read post tripled from about 1000 views to close to 3000.

Unfortunately, 2006 was also the year in which Imagethief languished a little bit as work and external writing  commitments ate into my time. This was particularly noticeable in the last quarter of year, when my work went crazy, and it has affected page views. Traffic peaked in March when Imagethief was one of the blogs featured on the Reuters site devoted to Hu Jintao's visit to the US, and has gently declined ever since as my posting frequency has dropped.

Somewhat offsetting that, the typical post now has 300 web page views and 400 RSS reads (a bunch of which are probably bots, but oh well). Not bad, considering there was a time when I went over the moon at 100 total reads. My benchmark for a really solid post is 1000 page views while the post is on the blog's homepage. Grade-A posts earn between 3000 and 4000 total page views as noted above. Hu Jintao's visit to the US, the Foxconn/Apple crisis and the problems of US Internet companies in China were the big issues of the year, and drove a lot of traffic. The all-time most read post, however, remains the May 2005 ringer on hyper-buxom Japanese kiddie-pinup, S@yaa Ir!e, with 11,000 plus. Sex still sells.

Regular web readers will note a change in the software. Imagethief now has a tag cloud and a couple of other new bells and whistles. Unfortunately, some of my hand-coded template changes have been eaten in the upgrade so, among other things, the Sitemeter and Technorati bugs are gone. I'll correct those later. Also, the tag scripting breaks Firefox, so Firefox users only see a list. In case you were wondering, "China" is the biggest tag. Go figure. Finally, the search index didn't survive the migration. I am looking into that. In the meantime, if you need to search Imagethief, use Google and search "Imagethief + the topic". It works about as well.

Thanks again to all Imagethief readers and last year's regular commenters. This is not the most widely read China blog, but I continue to be amazed and gratified at the quality of the readership. You guys are why I do this. Well, you and my oversized ego and all-consuming need to be loved.

Cumulative stats as of today:

• 801 posts including this one, fifty-five of which are CNET posts.
  
• 2936 comments
• Technorati rank: 34,625 with 569 links from 103 blogs in the past six months and 1,363 links overall. It has been significantly higher in past, but suffered with my posting frequency.
  
• Unique visits (from Sitemeter) 198,019, with 348,238 page views.
  

The ten most popular posts of 2006:
Gratifyingly, many of these are suitably meaty, topical analysis posts. However there are, as you can see, a couple of ringers. As always, the tendency of the best posts to continue rolling up views over time means that the big winners weight toward the beginning of the year.

Wednesday PR blog: Shanghai commits ironic PR suicide (May 17 2006)   
4346 web views, 297 subscription views, 2 comments.
A thorough ridiculing of Shanghai's overreaction to the hanging laundry and police incompetence portrayed in Mission: Impossible 3. Pushed up in the rankings by people searching for MI3, no doubt. Having moved to Shanghai, I can report that it is all about laundry drying in public places.

In praise of Google in China (Jan 25 2006)
4080 web views, 384 subscription views, 16 comments
My defense of Google's continued presence in China.

You farted (May 11 2006)   
3986 web views, 219 subscription views, 7 comments
It wasn't me, I swear.

Chinese swoon at Oscar victory of censored film (Mar 07 2006)   
3571 web views, 253 subscription views, 17 comments
The Chinese are thrilled when Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain wins an oscar. Too bad they won't see it. Legally.

MSN censorship of Anti creeps into US mainstream (Jan 04 2006)
3257 web views, 245subscription views, 8 comments
Et tu, Bill?

Q: What do my Chinese colleagues think of Bush + Hu? (Apr 21 2006)   
3138 web views, 1001 subscription views, 20 comments
Rebecca MacKinnon thoughtfully invited me to be one of the China blogs featured on a Reuters page devoted to Hu Jintao's star-crossed visit to the US. Here is what my Chinese colleagues thought of the showpiece meeting with W.

Saturday PR blog: Congress to grill US net firms on China (Jan 14 2006)   
3031 web views, 348 subscription views, 14 comments
The issue of the year was the poor handling by American Internet companies of the PR crisis that broke out over their complicity with the Chinese authorities' censorship restrictions. I wrote extensively on this. This post remarks on Rep. Chris Smith's plans to grill the companies in hearings, which he later did. The issue simmers on.

BadBranding@Singapore (Feb 05 2006)   
2924 web views, 399 subscription views, 17 comments
I love Singapore. I hate the Singaporean tendency to plug an "@" symbol into a brand and think that makes it cool. It is beyond cliche. You have to visit Singapore to understand how big of a problem this is. I rant about it here.

Snack row succumbs to night of the long jackhammers (Mar 29 2006)  
2157 web views, 211 subscription views, 6 comments
A Beijing color piece on the demolition of a row of cheap-eats stalls near my apartment.

Google mainlines the pervs to Imagethief (Mar 14 2006)
2028 web views, 232 subscription views, 6 comments
N*de+wedding+photos+a Google search=a pageview bonanza.  

Personal favorites:
Here are a few posts that didn't rate in the top ten for readership but that I liked or thought were important, or that generated good discussions.

Tuesday PR blog: What if Yahoo abandoned China? (Jun 19 2006)   
1725 web views, 242 subscription views, 6 comments
Supposing, just for the sake of argument, Yahoo decided to pull out of China for moral reasons?

Thursday PR blog: What was Foxconn thinking? (Aug 29 2006)
1786 web views, 286 subscription views, 13 comments
Roland of ESWN invited me to analyze the PR thinking behind Foxconn's ill-considered lawsuit of two Chinese journalists who wrote some shoddy articles. I obliged.

The trouble with English teachers (Aug 07 2006)   
1738 web views, 313 subscription views, 29 comments
Why don't they get any respect? Even from me? One of the pieces I adapted for That's Beijing and the most commented post of the year.

Official: Communist icon Lei Feng was "hip with his times" (Mar 05 2006)
1386 web views, 248 subscription views, 3 comments
Who knew? The latest in the government's attempts to keep a fading, pre-Cultural Revolution propaganda icon relevant in an era of iPods and Audis.

Haircut (Jan 08 2006)   
1256 web views, 329 subscription views, 9 comments
My first visit to the new salon downstairs. It was an inauspicious start to our relationship but, god bless these guys, I still use them.

Ten simple steps to improve Beijing's quality of life (Oct 18 2006)   
1245 web views, 353 subscription views, 23 comments
Beijing could be a great town, if only...

A week in the life of a China flack ( Jun 28 2006)
1054 web views, 310 subscription views, 8 comments
The glamor, the romance, the mystery.

Imagethief and the hell of yurts: A Xinjiang travelogue, part one (May 14 2006)
1051 web views, 245 subscription views, 11 comments
The first part of my over-written recollection of a trip to Xinjiang last fall. Parts two and three are also out there, along with a YouTube video companion.

Talk dirty to me (Jun 01 2006)
949 web views, 235 subscription views, 15 comments
Why French is a timelessly sensual language of romance and Mandarin, unfortunately, is not.

The kid (Aug 20 2006)
870 web views, 263 subscription views, 9 comments
His life sucks, and it probably always will. Fortunately for him, he's still too young to know it.

Tank-Man's place amongst the iconic images of my lifetime (Apr 18 2006)   
723 web views, 213 subscription views, 14 comments
The news photographs and television images that defined my lifetime, and remain engraved in my memory to this day. Tank Man is among them.

2005 Stats and Greatest Hits
Last year's similar summary.