Of all the new words that the Internet has given the English language, few are heard as frequently these days as blog and blogger. And if you listen to young Taiwanese people chatting, you find that the words’ Mandarin equivalents – buluoge (部落格) and boke (博客) – crop up just as often.

People in Taiwan who keep up with social and technological changes – meaning almost everyone here under the age of 40 – are well aware of what blogs are. What they may not know, however, is just how common blogging has become in this country. A blog, according to the definnition on the tech-terminology website www.netlingo.com, is “a website (or section of a website) where users can post a chronological, up-to-date e-journal entry of their thoughts.” Often posts feature links to items elsewhere on the Internet that the blogger – the person who adds content to the site – finds interesting, amusing, or objectionable.

Such e-journals are important because, in the words of the blog-tracking website Technorati, “they allow millions of people to easily publish their ideas, and millions more to comment on them.”

“More and more Internet users are becoming active participants,” the site says. “Weblogs allow everyone to have a voice.” As of January, Technorati was tracking 113 million blogs worldwide. Every day, 175,000 new blogs were getting started.

The English minority

In Taiwan, almost 15 million people use the Internet, and surveys indicate that at least 25% of these people manage blogs. This would suggest that the island is home to nearly 4 million bloggers. (Of course, it is hard to calculate how many blogs or bloggers exist, since some people maintain more than one blog, and some blogs are dormant, meaning they are no longer updated but can still be read online.)

It goes without saying that the vast majority of bloggers in Taiwan write in Chinese. Nonetheless, the country has an active English-language blogging scene. Michael Turton, an American who works as an instructor in Chaoyang University’s Department of Applied Foreign Languages, estimates that at least 700 blogs in English emanate from or focus on Taiwan.

Of these, Turton’s own “The View from Taiwan” (accessible at michaelturton.blogspot.com) is perhaps the most popular. At the end of 2007, three rankings of local English-language blogs were compiled by the Tainan-based author of “Fili’s World” (filination.com), who used various methodologies to arrive at the rankings. “The View from Taiwan” topped two of the three lists. According to Turton himself, his site gets between 800 and 900 visitors on most days.

Perhaps fortunately, Taiwan has yet to produce an equivalent of “Sex and Shanghai” (chinabounder.blogspot.com), a blog that sparked controversy in China in late 2006. The blogger, who claimed to be a Briton teaching at a Shanghai university, posted detailed accounts of his sexual adventures with local women. Outraged Chinese readers sought to have him identified and deported; their campaign was reported on by CNN, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Despite the ferocious language with which his critics described him, the author of “China Bounder” still appears to be in Shanghai. In the last 12 months, however, he has posted fewer than half a dozen times.

Taiwan may not have its own “China Bounder,” but ideas expressed by foreign bloggers do sometimes reach a mainstream audience. Last year, Greg Talovich, a teacher who posts in both English and Chinese, made use of his blog “Wandering in Wulai” (talovich.blogspot.com) to criticize the government’s “UN for Taiwan” slogan, calling it “wrong English and incomprehensible.” He called the government’s decision to stamp the slogan on pieces of mail an infringement of his freedom of speech.

“A legislator’s aide phoned,” recalls the American, “and asked me if I would consent to be interviewed.” As he later wrote on his blog, he was interviewed by seven TV stations as well as radio stations and newspapers. “It was far and away the most popular and controversial post on my blog to date,” Talovich says.

“Wandering in Wulai” is a multilingual blog. “When I started, my Chinese typing was a lot worse than it is now, so most of my posts were in English. Now my Chinese typing has improved. I would say that now it’s roughly 70% English to 30% Chinese, with smatterings of Atayal [the Aboriginal language spoken in Wulai].”

“The View from Taiwan,” on the other hand, is written entirely in English. Turton launched the blog in February 2005 to supplement a website (michaelturton.com) he has maintained for several years. That site is focused on providing information for foreigners who come to Taiwan to teach English; the blog, on the other hand, has become best known for political commentary.

This year, Turton has blogged at length about the legislative and presidential elections, and he has also written about water policy and problems in the education system. “I try to keep it as Taiwan-centric as possible,” he says. He provides links to articles of historical interest as well as to current news items.

Regular readers of “The View from Taiwan” will know that Turton is often dissatisfied with the way the international media report events in Taiwan. He has critiqued stories in The New York Times and other newspapers. He communicates his displeasure to editors, and encourages others to do so. “I know I’ve had an effect on how certain parts of the international media cover Taiwan,” he says.

Some readers, though, are mainly interested in the photos of everyday Taiwan that Turton posts in large numbers. Among the “prosaic images” that Turton has featured recently are a farmer working his vegetable patch and office workers burning ghost money.

Another of the better-known (and one of the longer-running) English-language blogs in Taiwan is “Poagao’s Journal” (www.poagao.org). This blog, by T.C. Lin, is similar to a personal diary, emphasizing his hobbies, moods, and feelings more than political or social commentary, and also providing a showcase for his photography.

“I started my site in early 2001,” says Lin, who grew up in the United States but became a Taiwan citizen in 1994. “I wanted to give people a place to view my photography without having to invite them over to look through dusty albums in my living room.” “I’d heard about a new program called Blogger that let you write online journals,” Lin continues, “so I decided to give it a go. I’ve continued it all these years because I enjoy writing, and I also like to go back and see what I was doing at a particular point.” Since early 2003, Lin has also been posting in Chinese in a separate part of his website. “I write in each language according to my mood. Sometimes I am in the mood more for a Chinese-language posting than an English-language one. But I tend to write more in English, perhaps because it’s a bit easier for me. The two don’t always intersect.”

The big bucks

Lin has experimented with advertising on his site. “I tried Google AdSense. I forgot about it, and then about four years later went to check my balance and found I’d made US$9 in that time. So I got rid of it. Ads annoy me. I see them as a sign that the author cares more for revenue than the experience of the user.”

Jason Cox – better known in the blogosphere as “A-Gu” (a-gu.blogspot.com) – had a similar experience with advertising. “I wasn’t making any money from advertisements. But I’ve left one banner on the site because it seemed unnecessary to cut myself off from all hopes of making some advertising money some day,” says the American. Cox’s blog is called “That’s Impossible: Politics From Taiwan.” “Originally, I wanted to post on U.S. politics, Taiwanese politics, and other topics that interest me, including Buddhist texts and linguistics issues,” says Cox, who started the blog in November 2006. “I also wanted the blog to be more or less bilingual when possible. I soon realized this was overly ambitious.”

“I had neither the time nor energy to make worthwhile posts on such a wide range of topics. That’s when I decided to try to fill a useful niche: same-day news updates of events in Taiwan and a focus on the legislative elections. The new districts being used – plus an interest in redistricting that I picked up in the United States – gave me a special motivation to read about and analyze this topic. That’s more or less how the blog became what it is.”

“I get between 50 and 100 unique visitors a day, and visits peaked during the presidential election at just under 250 a day,” Cox says. “I do like to track these stats, partly because I want to know who’s reading the blog, but mostly because it’s really given me satisfaction to know people do actually care about the things I post about, and I’m not just wasting my time.”

“For me, one factor is trying to decide what topics merit a post,” says Cox. “I do what I can to filter out the trash and post on worthwhile topics, and also try to clearly separate the facts from my own feelings.”

“Now that the elections are over, I'm not sure what direction I'll take the blog,” he adds. “For now, I'll act as a watchdog for the laws the legislature passes. Low-level elections are sometime later this year, and coverage is generally quite poor in local media and international media alike, so maybe I'll try to get more quality information out on that topic.”

Anybody out there?

But if some bloggers use tools like Google Analytics to find out where their readers come from, others – like Scott Sommers (scottsommers.blogs.com), an instructor at Ming Chuan University – admit to having only “a hazy idea” about who looks at their blogs. Sommers, who often writes about Taiwan’s English-teaching industry, believes he has thousands of readers and gets 200 to 300 visitors on a typical day. But, he says, “I don’t pay a lot of attention to these numbers.”

The Canadian believes that when began his blog in 2002, fewer than 10 English-language bloggers were active in Taiwan. “I’ve been writing since I was young – diaries, journals, letters to newspapers, entering literary contests. I’ve never tried to publish anything for money. [So blogging] seemed natural to me.”

Sommers says he has twice been threatened with lawsuits because of items posted on his blog, “Taiwan Weblog.” In those instances, he quickly removed the controversial sections. “I’ve changed entire posts because I’ve inadvertently offended people,” he says.

Sommers dislikes editing or deleting comments, however, a practice he likens to censorship. On occasion, however, he has felt it necessary. “Things can spin out of control,” he says.

Joanna Rees, a professional photographer who maintains a blog alongside her website “Joanna Rees Photography” (jorees.wordpress.com), says she gets 200 to 500 hits a day; the number goes higher when she posts more often. The three main themes of her blog are: her photography (the most popular topic, she says); working in academia (Rees teaches a course on Pronunciation and another on Media and Communications at Huafan University); and education (she is completing a doctorate in Fine Arts and Art Education at National Taiwan Normal University).

For people trying to promote themselves or their businesses, she says, “blogging is easier than having a website. It’s more immediate to update, and you don’t have to deal with a web designer.”

Rees says she often uses her blog as a business communication tool. “I tell prospective clients to look at particular posts, then they can see if they like my pictures,” says Rees, a Canadian. “I put my photos on the blog within hours of taking them, and then send a link to the editor who commissioned them.”

Taiwan’s English-language blogosphere, of course, is far smaller than the country’s Chinese-language blogging scene. Turton, who has attended two local conferences devoted to blogging, says that speakers at those conferences discussed Chinese-language blogs that garnered over 15,000 hits a day. (Incidentally, Turton says that local Chinese-language political blogs are overwhelmingly “green.” If you were to rely solely on them for information, “You’d get a very skewed idea of Taiwanese politics.”) Portnoy Zheng, a Taiwanese man who sometimes posts in English but more often in Chinese at “Working Man” (the URL is workingman.wordpress.com) has been praised by many for his work on “Global Voices” (globalvoicesonline.org), a website that collates and translates citizen journalism from around the world.

“Blogging is the future,” Rees says of efforts like this. “It does fill gaps. Blogs say things the mainstream media doesn’t say.”

“Blogging has been really important for long-term expatriates like me,” Turton says. “It’s all about building community. Even a blog that’s all about yourself can do that, as it’s putting part of yourself out there in public.”