The Taiwan Blog Feed
June 17th, 2006 by MarkBack when I first started this blog, the first one to link to me was Michael Turton. Every week he did a round-up off all the Taiwan blogs and somehow managed to dig up all the new and obscure blogs like mine. Truth be told, I’ve found most of the Taiwan blogs that I’ve really enjoyed through Michael’s blog round-ups. Unfortunately, like all good things, it had to come to an end. Doing a round-up of everybody’s blogging is a time-consuming task, and one that nobody could be expected to continue. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s thankful for all the round-ups he did have time for.
Since the discontinuation of the Taiwan Blog Round-up, I’ve been thinking of possible solutions. For a while, I entertained the idea of trying to get some friends together to do a “roving round-up”, in which we could take turns reading and blogging about the highlights of the local blogosphere each week. In the end, though, it was just too daunting. Instead, I’ve made a set up a news aggregator, which parses in each blog’s RSS (and to a less perfect degree, atom) feeds and publishes excerpts and links in the style of Google News. I’m still in the process of adding blogs to the Taiwan Blog Feed, and categorizing them. Once it’s completely up and running, this should help readers keep up with what’s going on in the English-speaking blogging community and hopefully drive a bit more traffic to some of the less well-known blogs, too.
If you want to see a blog added, send me your RSS link. Please restrict submissions to blogs primarily about Taiwan. If you publish RSS feeds for your blog but prefer not to have them parsed by this news aggregator, then email me and I’ll remove your blog.
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June 18th, 2006 at 12:07 am
This sounds like a really cool idea. As a technology geek, I’d also be interested in some kind of agregation of technology blogs. There’s a project called reddit that Joel Spolsky supports. I’m wondering if it would be possible to create a subchannel of reddit that would be Taiwan blogs only. Just a thought…
June 18th, 2006 at 12:17 am
I just took a look at reddit, and it looks pretty good. The moderation and karma system is especially useful. Oh, if only I could roll out something like that!
One thing that reddit does that I don’t want to do, though, is link to a lot of news syndications. I’d rather to make the Taiwan Blog Feed into something that drives more traffic to the little guys and gives people a more personal glimpse of life here.
June 18th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
The website looks great. Thanks for taking the effort to make the site and also for adding my blog to it!!!!
June 18th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
Great idea! I miss Michael’s Blog round ups.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:07 am
Damn! I was missing my own round-ups, and was considering something like them for the summer. Good idea, Mark!
Michael
June 19th, 2006 at 7:26 am
Michael, please don’t rule out the possibility of doing round-ups on my account! This blog feed is 99% automated, and not very bright. As you may have noticed, I haven’t figured out how to make it parse the category tags out of ATOM feeds (i.e. ones from blogspot). Hopefully the search function on the TBF will help you find blog posts about certain topics, and speed up your round-up-ing process, but I can’t promise anything!
June 19th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Good thinking Mark!
June 20th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Excellent idea, Mark. I look forward to reading it.
August 27th, 2006 at 9:43 am
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