We all know for sure that Vancouver has a very lively and active food blog scene.
A little while back I put up a blogroll of all the Vancouver Food Blogs on chowtimes (link here). To tell the truth I was completely and pleasantly surprised that we have so many food blogs dedicated to writing about restaurants and dining outs in our city.
Do you know how many sites there are on the chowtimes’ blogroll?
114!
Isn’t that awesome?
Just last week, Fairchild TV aired a documentary on chowtimes. In the introduction, it highlighted a point I made about how active the food blogging site is. In the absence of a better stat, I pointed to Fairchild the Urbanspoon Leaderboard above.
As you can see, Vancouver dominates 6 of the top 7 positions on the leaderboard for the number of posts published. The top Vancouver food blogs lead all the other blogs by a far margin. [Note: Victoria in the list refers to Victoria, Australia … not BC]
So that brings to our mind. Does Vancouver have the biggest community of food bloggers? I know Urbanspoon does not represent a lot of countries, particularly Asia where food blogging is not small.
You know what I would love to do? I would love to …
expand the leaderboard to a worldwide leaderboard of blog posts! But I have absolutely no idea how to do that easily (i.e. without consuming my life in that endeavour!).
That will remain a long term dream for now. Anyway, does anyone know of if there is a better stat available of food blogging around the world?
Expanding on the Chowtimes Blogroll
With the blogroll, it was rather easy for us to put a rudimentary list of “Most Active Vancouver Food Blog”. I used the RSS feed of every blog and generated a simple stat of the number of blog posts for fun.
I ran the numbers for December 2010 and this is the list of top 12 sites. The numbers in brackets are the number of posts:
December 2010
- Chow Times (40)
- Follow Me Foodie (37)
- Vancouver Foodster (36)
- Food For Buddha (34)
- Shermans Food Adventures (32)
- Word of Mouth (31)
- Bumble’s Bodacious Buffet (26)
- Foodology (26)
- This Blog Contains 0 Carbs (19)
- The Poor Food-e (18)
I know the list does not mean much. It is just a simple tabulation of posts without taking into account a lot of things. For instance, chowtimes’ numbers included recipes and weekend musings. The list also does not address the length or quality of the posts and so on and so forth. So please don’t read too much into this. I thought it was just fun to share with you this.
This brings to my mind what then would be a good metrics to measure a good food blog? We all know definitely not the number of posts although that number would be easiest to obtain. I think if there is ONE measurement of a good food blog, it is the number of pageviews the blog gets. However, I can’t think of an existing good way to get the number without voluntary participation of each blog (Alexa and Compete numbers are the closest but I don’t trust the numbers).
Since it does not take long to generate the list, I thought I go on to see what November and October list looks like. I thought not many people will blog in December given the holidays and all. So here is the list:
| October 2010 | November 2010 |
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I don’t know about you but I do think that Vancouver’s Food Blogs Rocks!
I really want to see how Vancouver measures up against the rest of the world.
Can you all share how the food blogging scene is elsewhere in the world? I think the Australians are big and so is UK. I know that when I started blogging on Chow Times, the Malaysian and Singapore food blogs were light years ahead of us.
The fact that I frequent 5 of the 6 top Vancouver blogs is …… kinda sad ? :-0
I think Sherman & KimHo are a conspiracy …. they post the same restaurants simultaneously ! LOL
the more Sherman and Kim blog, the more they start to think alike….. lol….. I love all the Vancouver bloggers….. Congratulations to Ben and Suanne for their placement on this list.
PS…. is there a reason why so many bloggers are of Asian descent? I never really thought about it until you mentioned that food blogging is popular in Asia.
Hi Jayda: Even if you look at it in Vancouver, we do have a disproportionate number of Asian food bloggers. I think it is because food plays a big part of the Asian culture. Ben
Ha Ben! I think the reason is simple – Asians simply love to EAT! =p
In the case of Chinese, many (or most ?) are “wai sek” (live to eat), LOL.
Kim & Sherman are really the same person!
… not. they just like to set up lunches & dinners together … a lot.
bromance? 😉
LOL ! I’ve already bugged them about it, that they are each other’s alter ego 😉
Love your comment, Kevin! ;D
Well, as I’ve said over and over again, the Urbanspoon leaderboard only represents the hits via the Urbanspoon itself and not in any way indicative of the actual hits a site receives. Thus, sites like Chowtimes gets much more hits than as shown on Urbanspoon. With that being said, as much as it is nice to be top of anything, the bottom line is that the people behind the blogs are truly passionate and that is all that counts.
LOL, Kim is a bastard anyways, he’s the evil twin! 😉
Waiting for Kim to chime in and say the exact same thing, LOL
OMG!!! That’s so mean!!! LMAO!!! I am looking forward to Kim’s counter-attack! LOL!!!
I think Kim would be happy to be known as the ‘evil’ twin…. it gives him even more presence.