TopBlogs Philippines Update

Here are some updates from Enthropia on their first month of launching the new Top Blogs Philippines. Their blog is not yet up so I’m republishing the announcement here for the meantime.

Hello everyone,

A quick update on how things are going.

First off, we have now tracked over 1 million unique visitors and almost 3.5 million pageviews, and we have sent out over 11,000 clicks to our participating members. You can see the stats here.

Also there has been some discussion about cheating and so forth, and let me quickly address it with some history.

The first top list we created was in 2000, and was named GameSites200.com. It is a site that now gets over 100,000 unique visitors a day, and has sent out over 100,000,000 clicks to the participating sites. That was the first version of our ‘top list’ script.

We then released the script publicly as evoTopsites. This was the script that Abe (Yuga) used to setup PinoyTopBlogs.com. It was a nice engine, but it had problems with scaling.

The next version we released was for BlogTopSites.com. It took evoTopsites and added performance measures, and extra stuff such as tag-support.

The latest version is what we have on TopBlogs.com.ph. What it does is analyze traffic over a bunch of days and, finding anomalies, reports them to us.

Now – this analysis takes time. Having two days or even a week of data does not make for good analysis. It takes time for the system to become ‘smarter’ as it recognizes what is regular and irregular behavior.

Furthermore, we have to err on the side of a mistake. For example, a blogger who operated multiple blogs was copying over some HTML from one blog to another, and accidentally included the TopBlogs.com.ph code. We could have taken the quick (and unnecessarily harsh) option of just banning his blogs.

Instead what our system does is flag potential blogs, and we had check over them. No system is perfect, and we want to make sure that we give legitimate bloggers a chance to fix anything they may have done wrongly.

With that in mind, I expect the fruits of the automated system to start coming into play next week. In the mean time, if you do see someone cheating, please do not hesitate to contact us.

I can only thank everyone for all the input we are receiving – it helps solidify that what we are doing is a valued part of the Filipino blogosphere.

Thanks again for using TopBlogs.com.ph.

– Andre
TopBlogs.com.ph