From the Executive Director:

Executive Update for November, 2004
Posted by Joseph Rowlands on 11/30/2004, 6:44pm

An interesting month. Our membership is up by 81, one of our slower growing months, but our author count is up by 6, which is great to see some new faces. With 45 articles this month, we're doing much better than our goal of one a day, but not quite up to two a day. The holiday season is always a little slow, but our page hit count is up to 400,000 this month. It looks like more people are reading.

The month started off with the US elections, seeing George W. Bush taking the presidency. There was a huge number of posts on the topic of the debate up until the election, and a few afterwards analyzing the results. But the excitement has lulled a little.

We had the Nathaniel Branden interview by Alec Mouhibian from the last Free Radical published here on SoloHQ. There were plenty of comments, both positive and negative.

We shut down the Yahoo SOLO group. As SoloHQ grew, the traffic to that mailing list steadily got smaller. We decided to shut it down instead of trying to split the audience into two groups.

Since it's the busy season of the year for many people, we tend to get less article submissions. This would be a great time for people to give it a try. Help keep SoloHQ full of the content that you appreciate. Click on "Contribute Content" on the front page.

Staff Changes:

1.)    Luther Setzer, the current Club Coordinator, is also SOLO Toastmasters Leader
2.)    Matthew Humphreys and Ashley Frazier are no longer moderators of the SOLO Yahoo forum since it has been closed.
3.)    Matthew Humphreys is still leader of SOLO Law.

New SOLOHQ Features:

1.) SOLO Toastmasters – a group started by Luther Setzer for people interested in Toastmasters and its compatibility with Objectivism
2.) SOLO Economics – A group created for the discussion of economics from an Objectivist perspective

SOLO Feature review:

In the last update, I explained how people can modify their account options. Since that was singled out as being useful, I'll try to mention SoloHQ features you may have missed.

On the forum page, you'll find two buttons that might be useful. "Last Day" and "Last Week".

With these, you can see all of the posts in the last 24 hours or the last 7 days. This is especially useful if you intended to reply to a message, but seemed to have lost it.

Job Openings (no money, but fame and adoration):

1.)    Public Relations Director– Somebody willing to go onto other forums and sites and relentlessly promote SOLO. Distributing this Executive Update is one possible function of the promoter.
2.)    SOLO NZ Coordinator – someone to decorate the portal page, possibly coordinate conferences/meetings
3.)    SOLO Economics Leader – Just someone to facilitate this group, set up the front page, etc. Preferably someone with an understanding and interest in economics.

Activism:

Want to help take over the world? Here are some simple ideas you can do to help.
1.)    Write articles.
2.)    Send us boatloads of money.
3.)    Bookmark our Amazon referral page http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/importanceofp-20 so that we get a percent of Amazon's profits from your purchases. Lots of people use Amazon, and if you use our associate program, we benefit at no cost to you.
4.)    Put www.solohq.com in your email signature file. It's an easy way to spread the word about the best Objectivist website on the planet.
5.)    Do you have a webpage? Add a link to SoloHQ.com. Also, add a link to our Ayn Rand page at http://www.solohq.com/ayn_rand/ayn_rand.shtml and our Objectivism page at http://www.solohq.com/Objectivism/. These improve our Google ranking and make it easier for young minds to find passionate reason and rational passion on the web.

Statistics:

Articles on SOLOHQ: 915 (45 this month)
Forum posts on SOLOHQ: 21,100 (1600 this month)
Author Count: 132 (6 new authors this month – Natur Leseul, William E. Perry, Bob Palin, Ashley Chan, Jeanine Ring, and Joseph C. Maurone )
SOLOHQ Members: 789 (81 new members this month)
Page Hits: 401,000

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