13 Jan, 2009 in
Taiwan Blogosphere . Tags:
2008; best; blog; bloggers; blogosphere; blogs; Taiwan; taiwanese; top;
Fili's world
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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 :
| URL | AllTheWeb | |
| 1 | http://michaelturton.blogspot.com | 101000 |
| 2 | http://onlyredheadintaiwan.blogspot.com | 25400 |
| 3 | http://keywords.oxus.net | 22600 |
| 4 | http://www.princeroy.org | 22100 |
| 5 | http://blog.taiwan-guide.org | 20700 |
| 6 | http://www.filination.com/blog | 19600 |
| 7 | http://www.therealtaiwan.com | 16300 |
| 8 | http://toshuo.com | 13300 |
| 9 | http://jorees.wordpress.com | 13200 |
| 10 | http://taiwanbaseball.blogspot.com | 12600 |
| 11 | http://www.craigfergusonimages.com | 12300 |
| 12 | http://dreintaiwan.blogspot.com | 11900 |
| 13 | http://www.onlyredheadintaiwan.com | 11800 |
| 14 | http://globetrotteri.wordpress.com | 11500 |
| 15 | http://dailybubbletea.wordpress.com | 11000 |
| 16 | http://www.frostfox.com/blog | 10700 |
| 17 | http://hungryintaipei.blogspot.com | 10700 |
| 18 | http://formosaneijia.com | 10200 |
| 19 | http://hikingintaiwan.blogspot.com | 10000 |
| 20 | http://scottsommers.blogs.com/taiwanweblog | 9270 |
| 21 | http://thedailybubbletea.com | 9110 |
| 22 | http://a-gu.blogspot.com | 9060 |
| 23 | http://www.taoyuan-nights.com | 8610 |
| 24 | http://bbluesman.com | 8400 |
| 25 | http://www.thenhbushman.com | 8260 |
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.
-
Interesting? boring? meaningful? meaningless? stupid? makes sense? helpful? waste of time? let me know… I’m interested.
Ashish | January 13th, 2009 at 12:09 pm #
Nice roundup of awesome Taiwan blogosphere. I came to know many of them from your 2007 recap. Thanks for your time and efforts :)
Fili | January 14th, 2009 at 11:24 am #
Ashish – My pleasure.
Todd | January 14th, 2009 at 1:02 pm #
Nice to see I’m still somewhere in the middle.
Fili | January 14th, 2009 at 1:46 pm #
Todd – you’re in the middle of the TOP blogs. I just included the top 25 blogs, but – as you probably know – there are hundreds of Taiwan based blogs out there. I’d say you’re a top Taiwan blogger ^_^ (and… you won best Travel blog on Taiwanderful, I’d say that means something).
MJ Klein | January 14th, 2009 at 6:20 pm #
it stands to reason that data can’t tell you what blog is popular.
Fili | January 14th, 2009 at 7:38 pm #
MJ – for that there’s Alexa, but there’s a problem applying to subdomains so I gave up on the idea. But you’re right, this is more about authority rather than popularity. I’m really curious about the most popular Taiwan blog’s – who it is and the stats of unique/pageviews. Just looking at incoming traffic from the random blogs that write about this blog, I’d say Michael has the best traffic, followed by David… :P
Carrie | January 14th, 2009 at 9:48 pm #
Yet another terrific round-up of top blogs! I was wondering if you were going to do this again. I’ve been looking forward to it. The only problem is I had to wait a whole year! I’m curious though. Since my URL is myseveralworlds.com, why is my old globetrotteri address still coming into play. Weird.
Fili | January 14th, 2009 at 10:13 pm #
Carrie – oh, sorry about that. I just ripped “Bloggers in Taiwan” without checking their list. I suggest you contact Andres and make sure it’s pointing to the right address.
TheDomainTracker | January 15th, 2009 at 5:49 pm #
hi..thanks for the list
cfimages | January 15th, 2009 at 9:39 pm #
Cool little round-up of everything. I’m not sure why mine scored so highly on All The Web considering over half of 2008 I was too busy to do any serious blogging.
David on Formosa | January 15th, 2009 at 11:34 pm #
I just thought I would go through the list of 25 blogs ranked by incoming links and tally up what blogging software people are using. There are two blogs in the list that are duplicated (The Only Redhead and Daily Bubble Tea).
Blogger 7
Wordpress 12
Wordpress.com 3
Typepad 1
Thanks for compiling the list.
Fili | January 16th, 2009 at 8:06 am #
All – BTW, for those blogs that are duplicated or have moved domains, having incoming links to the old domain suggests that the authority in the new domain could be alot higher if only the blogger asked all the blogs pointing to the old site to change the address. To see who is linking to your old domains you could easily look at Google Webmasters Tools or just run a “link:www.myoldblog.com” query on Google Search.
David – IMHO, too many Blogger users and although they enjoy high authority, they really can’t seem to make the most of that. I don’t know if you have, but maybe you can write something about the changes for you since you’ve moved from Blogspot to a self-hosted WordPress and how that influenced the way you blog or use blogging.
Links 19 January 2009 – David on Formosa | January 19th, 2009 at 8:24 am #
[...] Fili analyses the top Taiwan blogs. [...]
Poagao | January 19th, 2009 at 2:55 pm #
Finally, my resistance to SEO techniques is paying off.
dennis | January 28th, 2009 at 8:13 pm #
very useful mate, good job
Top bloggers 2009 : Best Taiwan blogs | Fili’s world | December 31st, 2009 at 7:05 am #
[...] Method : 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" and “Best Expat Taiwan Blogs : Analyzing Top Bloggers 2008”. [...]