Sunday, October 15, 2006

Review of Korean Blogs Part 2

Since my last review I’ve read another 48 Korean blogs. Again the majority are written by Americans and Canadians. I found one Finn Juho, but he's left to go back to Finland; A Dutch couple who have moved back to Holland; a Welshman named Aled and another Englishman called Craig.

Almost all the blogs are written by ESL teachers, one exception is DramMan a lawyer who is one of seven nominees for the Asia Blog Awards Best Korean Blog. He also posts on the The Marmot's Hole. Robert's blog is not in the running this year as he is one of the judges. The other nominees are Oranckay; Jodi’s The Asia Pages she writes on the single life in Korea and life as an expat American; Jeff Harrison seems mainly focussed on motorcycling; David at Staypuff is an Australian ESL teacher I mentioned last time; Michael Hurt at the Metropolitician who has some good postings and Occidentalist a group blog which has included some very detailed posts about the issue of the Dokdo Islands and the debate about whether Japan or Korea should rule them.
The poll closes on Oct 17th so get busy voting. You need to register your email address with the site to receive a link to the poll, but it is very quick to fill out your vote.

The other non teachers are The Idiots Collective where Aaron's occupation is listed as Maritime, Andy the Christian professor and Gary who has some very detailed posts on Korean Language. I also found Cat at Seoullife another trailing spouse and two mothers who blog Buhay and I particularly enjoy Jennifer's long posts on Between Pee and Kimchee. There were a total of 15 female bloggers including Expat Jane and Kathreb who both post interesting and regular items on Korea, though Kath lives in the UK.

I found a couple of blogs with some great photos Gdimension and Max Watson and two excellent comedy blogs The Yangpa which posts satirical Korean news stories and Beloved Leader, the supposed musings of Our Leader Oop North.

I exchanged a few emails with Alan the owner of the Korea Bloglist and he has made a couple of changes to the site to make it easier to report broken sites and changed the latest blog page to show all the blogs in the order they were added.
He has now moved to Japan and has less time to dedicate to the site. I did volunteer to help him maintain the site but he was unable to give me rights due to technical difficulties. I hope he continues to maintain this very useful resource. I have found that up to 20% of visitors to my blog have come from there.

I also found three other lists of Korean blogs. The ExpatBlogs site has a list of 34, This wiki which only has a list of 10; Here at Galbijim which is another wiki with a list of over 100 Korea blogs. Since the latter is open to anyone to be able to edit and update I am considering uploading the list of blogs and fields I have been collating to that page. I think the fields would be name, gender, nationality, frequency of posts, number of links, RSS feed and a general description of the blog.

3 comments:

Gary said...

Nice review of the all those blogs Jon. One of these days we gotta hit up Two Two!!

Jennifer said...

Thanks for the compliment Jon! And thanks for doing the legwork, looking at all those blogs...

Anonymous said...

Jon, we have a lot of similar ideas about improving Galbijim's blog portal. Drop me a line at craig@galbijim.com, if you'd like to brainstorm and share ideas.

Regards,
Craig