One of my favorite year-end traditions has become tallying the list of the most-read stories on the Tribune’s Web site over the previous 12 months. What’s not to like? It has all the excitement, suspense and surprise of the holiday season without the last-minute shopping and gift returns.

True to form, the Top 20 list for 2007 didn’t disappoint. Some of the top stories were no-brainers: All three local murders made the list. So did coverage of the neo-Nazi march through downtown Columbia early in the year. Stories about the MU Tigers football team were a hit.

And who can forget the woman who brought her hyperactive monkey to Stephens Lake Park in September only to make a hasty exit when the potentially diseased pet bit two kids? Soon to follow was a statewide monkey hunt, a segment on Comedy Central’s "The Colbert Report" and a story that generated 14,701 hits, enough to land it at No. 10 for the year.

More curious was a story under the headline "Theater on the edge," about plans for a provocative new performance venue downtown called Theater NXS. It was No. 3 with 19,609 hits in October. Apparently there’s more interest in R-rated live drama than you might think.

"Burglar targets charity," about thefts at Big Brothers Big Sisters in April, landed at No. 6 with 17,925 hits - everyone loves a good villain story - and a September story about high gas prices called "Dude, that’s a scooter" generated 15,048 hits, good for No. 8.

They’re not the stories I’d tag as the most memorable, but it’s not the first time I’ve been humbled by the will of the Web-crazy masses. There’s just no arguing with the Internet when it comes to matters of popularity.

For the uninitiated, the Internet is the global computer network devised by college students to undermine the stability of the newspaper industry. Newspapers took the bait by creating expensive Web sites designed to give their content away for free with the hope of someday making it pay off. Ten years later, we still haven’t figured out how to make it pay off, but we’ve become really good at instantaneously delivering hard-hitting stories such as "Texas sex club sues over city’s ban," No. 14 on the 2007 list with 13,999 hits.

That was one of two wire stories that cracked the Top 20 this year. The other was "Beer and the Bible," about a group of Baptists that meets for church at a St. Louis brew pub. It generated 18,219 hits and wound up No. 5 on the list. Curiously, that story shared a theme with last year’s overall winner on the Web: "Brewer taps gluten-free beer market," a story about a guy who invented a type of beer that people with celiac disease can drink. It generated more than 90,000 hits.

Note to self: Assign more stories about beer.

It’s always a barrel of laughs to compare the Web list with the editors’ picks for top local stories of the year and see which ones fell flat online.

This year’s doesn’t-translate-well-to-the-Web winner goes to the University of Missouri and its search for a new president. MU provides more jobs for the local economy than the next 12 largest local employers combined, so you can make a pretty good case that finding a new leader - it turned out to be former Sprint Nextel CEO Gary Forsee - is a relatively big deal.

But is it interesting? Apparently not to people who surf the Web for news. "Curators pick Forsee as president" registered barely 2,000 hits. That’s slightly more than the number of hits generated by that day’s arrest log but not quite as many generated by the story a day earlier about a 17-year-old who missed a curve on Highway 63 and accidentally ran off the side of the road. Only a May story linking U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof to the presidential search generated more hits at 3,000.

Let’s face it, when it comes to popularity on the Web, it’s hard to beat car wrecks and drug busts. Don’t scoff at those news briefs that run on Page 2. They’re typically some of the most popular stories on our Web site.

Maybe Forsee fizzled online because word had already leaked about his selection as president. Or maybe the Web stats reveal a dirty little secret about human nature: We’re really more interested in human suffering than we are in human achievement.

The No. 1 Tribune story on the Web was "Two arrested in fatal shooting," about Columbia’s first murder victim of the year, 17-year-old Tedarrian Robinson. It generated 26,403 hits in April. The story might have gotten a boost from initial erroneous broadcast reports that the shooting took place on the MU campus; it happened the same week as the massacre at Virginia Tech.

More likely, the story about a good kid in the wrong car at the wrong time resonated with the always-plugged-in generation, and the Internet was a handy way for them to read about it.

So, as usual, if it’s bizarre, criminal, intoxicating or tragic, you can find it at the top of the list of most-viewed stories on the Web. Does that mean we’re doomed as a society? I don’t think so. When government is so corrupt, taxes are so high and the economy is so bad that stories about politics, elections and unemployment turn people’s attention away from beer and monkeys, then I’ll be worried.

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