Tuesday 20 May 2014

Blogs gone by

I'm afraid this will be a nostalgic post, since I'm now doing a clean-up of my blog roll to weed out those blogs that are no more.

Unfortunately The Modern Leifeng seems to no longer be with us, though his old blogspot blog, last updated in 2010, is still extant, and he's still posting about football in the orient over at Wild East Football. Likewise GongShangFa-blog appears to be "pining for the fiords", which is a pity given that writer's enjoyably acerbic commentary on the China scene.

Froogville, an early blogger on the China scene, stopped updating in late 2012 and hasn't been seen since. I urge all HHGG fans to check out this post which suggests about as good an explanation of the plot of Douglas Adam's masterpiece as is ever likely to be put forward.

Run Run Roll, a Taiwan re-expat blog that charted an expat's attempt to keep living the expat dream for as long as possible, finally rolled to a halt last year it seems and no longer loads. Under The Jacaranda Tree hasn't posted in more than a year, but, more to the point, it's been just too long since they posted anything I was interested in reading - they're out.

Exiledonline is still up, but failed to live up to the standard of the original eXile after they got thrown out of Russia. I urge you to read this excellent 2010 Vanity Fair article which tells their story, but all the same they're out too.

So what's left? Here's some China/expat blogs that are still up-and-running and well worth your attention:

People have been talking about the "slow asphyxiation" of the blogosphere, at least the world of China/expat blogs, for a while now. Personally, whilst I no longer use the blog to simply share links that people I know will be interested in reading (Facebook and Twitter are much better for this) I still occasionally have an idea about something in the news that I'd like to write down somewhere and is just too long for a Facebook post, where it will likely get lost amongst the cat memes anyway. Blogs like the ones above show I'm not the only one who thinks this way.



1 comment:

Jeremy Smith said...

Interesting links and wrap up, thanks.