Top Madville Times Stories of 2011: Readers’ Choice!

The Madville Times now has one full year under its belt with the new domain and the new WordPress template. No hackers, no server disasters... and lots of reader participation! As I riffle through my stats, I find over 11,000 comments from you, dear readers, plus nearly 2000 comments that I wrote in response.

So what got you all reading and talking this year? Let's take a look at two lists. First, let's look at the pages that got the most views:

Now this count does not include straight home page views (which numbered over 333,000) where folks come to read the latest stories. That just counts how many times people clicked on a specific story to read and perhaps comment.

The #1 and #9 stories drew a surge of national and international readers searching for information on the weird story of a church buying an entire town. They also drew a lot of Iglesia ni Cristo members who found the link shared on their usual online hangouts and came with their standard fallacious apologetics. The #2 story drew a spike from one bodybuilding forum where someone linked to my Arnold bicycle photo, as well as subsequent Google image searches for Arnold Schwarzenegger and bicycle.

But most of the rest of the most-viewed stories had less to do with riding Google-search waves and more to do with your real interest in mostly local stories. My dairy-related stories may not have drawn as many comments as other stories, but there was a constant interest in the subject of Rick Millner's bankrupt dairies in Veblen, his partners' acquisition of a dairy eight miles from my house for him to manage, and the political fallout from Rep. Stace Nelson's opposition to a mega-dairy in his backyard. the four dairy stories on this list alone garnered over 4,100 views.

Education was another popular read here. The five education stories on this list drew over 5,200 views. Those top five stories covered a range of issues: both Madison bond votes for the new gym, the Madison-Rutland busing controversy, the Yankton opt-out, and the statewide K-12 budget cuts.

I tagged 178 posts with "Kristi Noem." (What, me obsessed? ;-) ) Of those posts, two made the 20 most-viewed list: the April discussion of Noem's status as Congressional intern and the story I broke in August on Kristi's big country club fundraiser with Speaker Boehner.

Now let's compare what you looked at with what you talked about:

Again, Iglesia ni Cristo drove up the comment count as some of us questioned the whether Christians can logically reject the Trinity and the divinity of Christ and submit to the block-voting diktats of their clergy. But the death penalty provoked a lot of local conversation. The surprise entry on this list is #10, on Rep. Frank Kloucek's first bill in the 2012 Legislative hopper. Posted just two days ago, this post provoked an instructive discussion of non-compete clauses and issues of contracts and intellectual property in South Dakota (and may well bump up to #9 on the above list before I finish my lunchtime sandwich!)

Over the weekend, I'll write up my list of the stories I thought were most important in 2011. But dear readers, I welcome your continued (and often surprising!) input on the issues you think we should bring to the fore in the South Dakota blogosphere. Thank you!