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Six Months of SOLO HQ
by Jeff Landauer

Page views by month for first 6 months of SoloHQ May 15,456 Jun 16,662 Jul 20,618 Aug 22,165 Sep 28,953 Oct 39,699 Total page views = 143,553 Unique Visitors = 19,894

SoloHQ.com went public on May 1, 2002. Six months later, we're still going strong. Traffic in October was up 257% from May. We have gotten some good links to SoloHQ, and Google has decided that we have daily content, so has started crawling SoloHQ every day.

In the past six months, we've had an article on the front page every weekday. 148 articles -- a pretty impressive feat. This was only possible thanks to the ever-growing set of contributing authors. We have also gained the services of an editor, Craig Ceely, to keep those contributing authors in line.

The "Around The Web" portion on the side of the front page has been replaced by a more "blog-like" news section in the main column that allows for commentary along with the links. Chris Matthew Sciabarra has signed on as our official News Correspondent, and will be posting Ayn Rand sightings in the media and academia. I hope that others will also contribute news items of interest.

We have added a personnel page that lists some of the offices that people have volunteered for. We added a past polls page, so people can vote in and view past polls. Also, at Joy Bushnell's request, we have added a random past article to the bottom of the main page.

You can view SOLO's first product, the 2002 Michael Newberry calendar, which was orchestated and is being sold by Barry Kayton. In the works is also a new and greatly expanded bookstore.

We currently have two places for discussion within SOLO: the forum here at SoloHQ and the email list at Yahoo Groups. The forum here has been very nice because its threads can be linked to daily articles and projects, which sparks discussion; but its email capabilities are fairly limited. On the other hand, the list at Yahoo Groups is good for email discussion, but has a slow and clunky web interface, and is full of advertisements. In the future, I hope to create a new forum for SoloHQ that has good interfaces for both the web and email, so that we can combine the two.

SoloHQ was originally envisioned as both a focal point for activism and an entry-level place for activism. We wanted to encourage people to post and write articles as a way to get them involved in the Objectivist movement, and provide a War Room to post methods for waging the war for men's minds and also discussing projects within that war. There hasn't been much added to the War Room's small initial content, but we have a recently gotten a volunteer as the new general of the War Room: Sam Pierson.

In short, SoloHQ was to be the center and face of SOLO. It has maintained and expanded its audience and, more importantly, expanded the group people willing to write articles and take responsibility for specific portions of SoloHQ. It has not petered out like many other sites. We have a long way to go in our war against the current culture (and some of the current Objectivist culture as well), but things are certainly going in the right direction here.