The last week in January showed a nice pick-up in volume on www.kwase-kwaza.org, the News section is now the most popular. Derek Ridgers is the most common search phrase bringing business and I am pleased to see business coming in from this site.

The countries which have just crossed the �100 requests� threshold include Spain Japan Germany Austria Sweden and Finland. Counties crossing the �10 requests� threshold include Ireland, Iceland, Botswana, Russia, Hungary, Zimbabwe, Norway, Virgin Islands, Belize and Portugal. Belgium and Canada have crossed the �500 requests� line and South Africa and Italy are coming up to it. This international readership is one of the positive signs for me � and it makes me keep on my �editorial� policy on the news pages of chosing interesting article around a cluster of themes from lots of different newspapsers across the world. I have been putting a lot of stuff up about India in the last fortnight and I would say that seems to be going down OK � also of course anything out of the ordinary on the current global crisis eg stuff on Bush�s religious roots in Texas.

I met the Chief Inspector of Adult Learning yesterday in Coventry � a really interesting guy with an industrial design and ergonomics background � he knew of Steve Phesant and Peter Buckle. He had also been the Chief Exec of St Martins School of Art which is where some of my heros first emerged like Gilbert and George plus Richard Long � I did drop that Steve and I had done a lot of be-bop in Drury Lane � round the corner from St Martins. We actually managed (apart from this) to keep to the subject in hand despite this. In fact inspired by this I went back to the office and found a really good site following up something he had explained � some excellent ILO research published as a book and available online.

Back at the ranch the new NYRB has arrived:

�Jazz Modernism � from Matisse and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce� by Alfred Appel Jr � just gotta have it!!