Top bloggers 2009 : Best Taiwan blogs

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 2010 almost in, I thought I’ll do a special 2009 summary tribute of the top of Taiwan’s expat blogosphere.

Note : I urge my fellow Taiwan bloggers to do the same. The Taiwan blogosphere has come a long way in the time I’ve been following it, but Taiwan bloggers still do not link and promote each other as much as they could. If you see a blog here you like, please take the time to add it to your blogroll, check your blogroll for broken links, and try and write a summary of your 2009 favorite Taiwan blogs.

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.

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”.

To perform the analysis, I used A1 Website Analyzer 2.0.4 to rip down all "Bloggers in Taiwan” sidebar Taiwan blog listings. Then I checked their rankings according to different methodologies commonly used for comparing websites.

Top 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 1.4.7.11)

There are also about 120 active Taiwan blogs with pagerank 4.

Top Taiwan blogs ranked by Yahoo 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 Yahoo link 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 webpages that are pointing to that address with a link :

Taiwan blogs ranked by visitor and judge voting

Taiwanderful hosts a Taiwan blog directory and runs an annual blog awards. The results of the voting in the 2009 Taiwan best blog awards are below.

Please note that only the blogs registered at the blog directory participated in the awards. If your blog isn’t registered, you can add it here after log in (you can login using your Facebook account).

Overall

Peer-judged: A Hungry Girl’s Guide to Taipei
Popular vote: shu flies

Photography

Peer-judged: Neil Wade’s Photography Blog, Craig Ferguson Images
Popular vote: Craig Ferguson Images

Personal

Peer-judged: The New Hampshire Bushman, shu flies
Popular vote: shu flies

Politics

Peer-judged: Taiwan Matters!, That’s Impossible: Politics from Taiwan
Popular vote: Taiwan Matters!

General

Peer-judged: Betelnut Equation, Sponge Bear
Popular vote: Jar of Buttons

Travel

Peer-judged: A Hungry Girl’s Guide to Taipei, Hiking Taiwan
Popular vote: A Hungry Girl’s Guide to Taipei

I owe many thanks to the judges Ben, Portnoy, Carrie, Todd, DJ Marcus, and especially David for helping make this happen this year.

There are a few blogs I admire for the passion they have for all that’s Taiwan – politics, culture, food, hiking… So, the blogs I personally voted for were -

Overall award

1. Taiwan Matters – Green political passion like I’ve never seen before.
2. Jerome F. Keating’s Writings – intellectually stimulating.
3. Betelnut Equation – one of my favorite reads about extreme cross cultural interactions
4. The New Hampshire Bushman – devotion to showing Taiwan and getting the Taiwan blogosphere together.
5. Charles Meacham Photography Blog – didn’t know this photography blog before, glad I found it. Although I adore Craig & Neil, they’re well known and this one is worth checking out.

General

1. Betelnut Equation
2. Sponge Bear
3. F. Varga

Personal

1. The New Hampshire Bushman
2. shu flies (舒飛) :: life in Taiwan
3. 24°09′N 120°40′E

Travel

1. A Hungry Girl’s Guide to Taipei – it’s rare that I see this kind of passion to food, especially Taiwanese food. An absolute treasure if you’re in the Taipei area.
2. Hiking Taiwan
3. Wandering Taiwan

Please also visit my Fili’s World Links page for other recommended blogs. If you’ve been linking to Fili’s World and wish to be added to that page, drop me a line.

What’s on your list?