Best Expat Taiwan Blogs : Analyzing Top Bloggers 2008

There are some really great English language Taiwan blogs out there, and almost every week I discover another one that’s worth keeping track of. With 2009 just in, I thought I’ll do a special 2008 summary tribute of the top of Taiwan’s expat blogosphere.

I’ll try my best  to do it systematically, using some tools and rankings that I have, somewhat similar to what I did back in "English language Taiwan blogs : The top bloggers 2007".

DISCLAIMER : this is only for my fun and play, nothing else. This could be completely wrong and messed up, and it means nothing. It’s just my way of using what’s available to try and understand something more about our little Taiwan blogosphere, but it might be completely flawed.

To perform the analysis, I used A1 Website Analyzer 1.3.9 to rip down all "Bloggers in Taiwan” sidebar Taiwan blog listings and then applied some SEO software to validate that the blogs still exist, as many are no longer there. Then I checked their rankings according to different methodologies commonly used for comparing websites.

Taiwan blogs ranked by Alltheweb incoming links

There are many services that check how many incoming links there are to a blog, but Alltheweb performs the best with blogs, since the others mess up with blogging services that are hosted on subdomains (like : ABCDEF.BLOGSPOT.COM hosted on Blogger’s BLOGSPOT domain). When I looked at the Alltheweb rankings, they did made sense to me (done with Link Popularity Check 3.0.3).

What incoming links are about is the number of external sites mentioning or pointing to that domain, giving it a higher authority. If it says 2000, it means there are ~2000 websites that are pointing to that address with a link :

Taiwan blogs ranked by Google Pagerank

Incoming links are an important factor but they have a problem since they don’t contain “authority” relevance. Getting 2 links from high-quality high-authority sites might be worth more than getting 10 links from low-quality low-authority sites. The (somewhat controversial) rank for that kind of authority is Google’s Pagerank which gives a number between 0 and 10 ranking a site’s authority based on the authority of the incoming links. The more quality incoming links you have, the higher the authority. So, it’s another way of looking at what kind of attention Taiwan blogs get (done with PaRaMeter 1.4.5.8)

Taiwan blogs ranked by User Voting

Most of you have probably heard about the Taiwanderful Best Taiwan Blog Awards 2008, so based on voting the following are the best Taiwan blogs 2008 :

Best Taiwan Blog 2008

The New Hampshire Bushman (http://www.thenhbushman.com/)

Best Taiwan Education Blog 2008

Mandarin Scholarship Taiwan (http://mandarinscholarship.com/)

Best Taiwan General Blog 2008

The Wild East (http://www.thewildeast.net/applications/wordpress/)

Best Taiwan Other Blog 2008

Poohat and the 10 billions years before the sun blew up (http://www.poohat.blogspot.com/)

Best Taiwan Personal Blog 2008

Mouse Eared Kiwi in Taipei (http://taipeiblog.sandra.net.nz/)

Best Taiwan Photography Blog 2008

Taiwan Photographers (http://www.taiwanphotographers.wordpress.com/)

Best Taiwan Politics Blog 2008

Taiwan Matters! (http://taiwanmatters.blogspot.com/)

Best Taiwan Religion Blog 2008

SQJ Taipei (http://pagels.teamexpansion.org/sqjtaipei/)

Best Taiwan Travel Blog 2008

The Daily Bubble Tea (http://thedailybubbletea.com/)

And that’s about it. ^_^

It’s interesting to see some of the changes and additions from 2007 to 2008.

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Interesting? boring? meaningful? meaningless? stupid? makes sense? helpful? waste of time? let me know… I’m interested.