Ten years of blogging at David on Formosa

A decade is quite a long time in the relatively short history of the internet. So I thought it was worth noting that this blog’s first post was written on this day ten years ago. At that time Facebook was only a few weeks old and Twitter hadn’t even been thought of. The internet has certainly changed and in some respects blogging has been overtaken by shorter, faster and more networked forms of online publishing.

I have put a lot of time and effort into creating content for this blog over the years. It has been a valuable experience and it has given me many opportunities. It has helped me to connect with a great group of bloggers in Taiwan and also to engage with an even larger group of people that read this blog.

At the time I started the blog I was inspired and encouraged by Michael Turton who continues to set the standard as a prolific Taiwan blogger. There are a few others in the Taiwan blogging community that I would like to mention. Kudos to TC Lin who continues to write at what is probably Taiwan’s longest running blog. Fili did a lot to promote blogging in Taiwan through Taiwanderful and the Taiwan blog awards. MJ Klein did a great job promoting social activities for bloggers such as the legendary Blogtoberfest. Tim Maddog started off with a personal blog, managed the group blog Taiwan Matters and then built a large following on Twitter. It has also been great to see my friend and classmate Ben Goren channel his passion for and knowledge about Taiwan into an award winning blog.

I have moved on from Taiwan and this blog is only sporadically updated. I still have fond memories of being part a vibrant community of bloggers who recorded many of the exciting, weird and wonderful happenings on the island of Formosa. I also still appreciate the work of those who continue blogging and help me to keep up to date with what’s happening in Taiwan.

Meeting Mr 6

Earlier in the week I had the chance to meet with Mr 6, one of Taiwan’s top bloggers. The meeting seemed timely as Michael Turton and Scott Sommers have both recently blogged on the lack of connection between Chinese-language and English-language bloggers in Taiwan.

I had an interesting conversation with Mr 6 and one of the topics we talked about was how to create more links between the Chinese-language and English-language blogospheres in Taiwan. We also discussed English teaching and Web 2.0.

Mr 6 has published an article based on our meeting on his blog today. For those who can read Chinese I suggest you go directly to Mr 6’s blog. For those who prefer English I’ll write a summary and translation of part of the article.

The first part of the article discusses “kiss and ride”. I have already covered this topic extensively on this blog, so I probably don’t need to say anything more about it.

The second part of the article gives an introduction to English language blogs in Taiwan. This might be nothing new to people that regularly read this blog, but there are a huge number of Taiwanese people blogging in Chinese who are probably not aware of these blogs.

The Chinese text below is from Mr 6’s blog and is followed by my translation in English.