Year in review from one perspective

“DrugSense FOCUS Alert #357 – Monday, 31 December 2007

2007 saw almost fifteen thousand new news clippings added to the www.mapinc.org archives.

Over a half million different readers from about 125 countries accessed the clippings during the year. Based on a formula which recognizes that older clippings may have been accessed more than the more recent ones, selections of the 600 most read clippings by areas of the world are provided at the following links:

http://mapinc.org/find?369 2007 in Review – Australasia

http://mapinc.org/find?370 2007 in Review – Asia

http://mapinc.org/find?366 2007 in Review – Canada

http://mapinc.org/find?368 2007 in Review – South America

http://mapinc.org/find?367 2007 in Review – United Kingdom

http://mapinc.org/find?365 2007 in Review – United States

The year 2007 was good for our Letter to The Editor writing activists, with about 2,230 letters printed that we know of as shown at http://mapinc.org/lte/

The year also saw a nice upgrade in the online look of the DrugSense Weekly http://www.drugsense.org/current.htm

Among the best kept secrets in the reform community is the 30,000 plus record Media Contact On Demand database, which received a facelift during 2007 for ease of use and for which the data is continuously crawled – computer programs are checking the web for changes – and updated http://www.mapinc.org/mcod/

During the year DrugSense switched from using Paltalk to TeamSpeak for on line voice chats because the server software resides on our own server and because the program works as well on MAC and Linux computers as on Windows PCs. Besides MAP/DrugSense meeting rooms, both Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and the Ohio Patient Network have meeting rooms. Details about the software are at http://www.mapinc.org/resource/teamspeak/

It has also been a busy year for the DrugSense webmastering/website hosting team supporting 125 reform websites and over 200 email lists and forums. Among the major projects of the year were these:

– Major upgrades of The Drug Truth Network http://www.drugtruth.net and the LEAP websites http://www.leap.cc

– Adding new websites http://thepotlawhasfallen.ca/, http://compassionatecanadians.com/, http://www.illinoisnorml.org/, and http://chemicalbigotry.org/, with others in the works.

Oh, we have probably left out something we did during the past year that is important to you, but it is hard to keep on top of all that happens at DrugSense.

On behalf of the MAP/DrugSense family of activists we wish you all the best for the New Year!

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Prepared by: The MAP/DrugSense Family of Activists”