Top 5 Blog Posts for 2008

My top five 2008 blog posts, based on unique page views:

1. Demand for Plumpy'Nut Outstrips Supply

2. At Work with Malawi's Nurses

3. Who Are the Health Eight (or H8)?

4. Al Gore: Clean Coal is a Lie

5. Agnes Binagwaho on Brain Drain

When I look at the analytics graphs for these posts, I am struck once again by the ways in which the Web captures ephemeral posts and makes them permanent.

The Plumpy'Nut post received the greatest number of unique page views. In fact, even my posts from 2007 on the controversy surrounding the patent for this nutritional supplement, which helps to save the lives of starving kids, still get a lot of hits. Intriguingly, views of the the post on the demand for Plumpy'nut peaked in July, two months after the post first appeared.

I'm glad to see "At Work with Malawi's Nurses" continues to be popular since it describes the focus of my Nieman Fellowship field project and has occupied a lot of my psychic energy over the past year. It's still chugging along at 58% of its peak back in March.

"Who are the Health Eight (or H8)?" about eight big players in the global health field continues to amaze me. It has had two peaks since it first appeared in April (the second, taller than the first, coincided with the July meeting of the G8 on health in Tokyo) and is currently on its third big upward slope, which seems likely to beat the other two.

My very simple reporting of Al Gore's speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in September, in which he called the concept of "clean coal" a lie, got attention from both the left and right zones of the blogosphere. It is on a second surge, possibly related to the coal ash spill in Tennessee earlier this month.

And the Agnes Binagwaho post, in which she speaks movingly of her own temptation to quit practicing medicine in Rwanda, has the most intriguing web analytics profile--a couple of peaks and valleys that also grow in popularity and that I think mirror the different speeches she has given on university campuses in the U.S.