Pinoy Top Blogs just turned 2!

This completely escaped me until Von mentioned it in the comments. Last Sunday, my Pinoy Top Blogs project just turned 2. Here’s that first post that started it all, and a year later, it was already running on it’s own domain in a dedicated server.

A lot of sleepless nights tweaking mySQL, tons of spam submissions, and several thousand dollars in server costs later, it’s still running and tracking over 2,800 Pinoy blogs (probably the largest list of active Filipino blogs out there).

It has been cited in so many academic research, both in print and broadcast media as well as conferences and summits. The Filipino Librarian has also been very diligent to track the monthly progress and shifts in the rankings.

Despite that, I often encounter comments from casual visitors how the list has degraded. There was this one time, at the band camp during the recent iBlog Summit, a person came up to the microphone and addressed Manolo this question (and I’m paraphrasing here) — “You talk about creating great content refer to this top blogs list, but if you look at the list all you see are blogs ranking on top with not much compelling content. Does this top list represent the Philippine blogosphere? If this is the creme of the crop, then I don’t think blogging is a performance art.”

I wanted to stand up and offer my opinion but I don’t think he’ll understand SEO or search popularity. Content might be king, but it’s the Search Queen that drives traffic. Besides, I suppose he might have not noticed that the showbiz and entertainment industry cuts across all borders, and that includes blogging. Even in Inquirer.net, it’s usually 9 out of the top 10 most read articles of the week are about showbiz. That makes Dolly Anne Carvajal the most widely read or popular columnist.

Again, the list doesn’t represent anything grand or majestic. It only tells us which blogs gain the most traffic without distinction between direct, organic search or repeat readership — that’s it. It does not represent the creme of the crop (I originally hope it would but I gave up on that one too). It only tells us entertainment is still #1.