Thanks for your vote.

Every year Taiwanderful.net’s competition for Best Blog in Taiwan gets tougher; we won in the award’s first year, 2008. This year we got more votes than ever (149), but an upstart competitor (!), My Kafkaesque Life, busted a nut as the underdog, somehow clocking an incredible average of 70-100 votes per DAY in the last week of the vote, which began Dec. 1st, and wound up getting the most votes overall. It’s a pretty good site, check it and other Taiwan blogs out! And if you’re one of these blogs, send us an email — we’ll be happy to do a link exchange with you.

Here’s the complete list of winners this year.

Until the last week of voting, our faithful readers kept The Wild East Magazine first in our category (General/Northern Taiwan), and 3rd or 4th overall. We finished Dec. 20th 2nd in our category and 5th overall, having the last evening overtaken the favorite in the Personal category, Shu Flies.

Then, as it turns out, we won the peer vote, by other bloggers in Taiwan. Well isn’t that nice! Thank you peers, for your vote of support for all we do!

We’ve been busy…The year 2010 was important for The Wild East Magazine. W.E. (Wild East) truly became an online collective for talented new writers, specializing in unique and exclusive coverage of the arts, culture, language, history and politics in Taiwan — and Greater China. The newspaper industry might be tanking worldwide; as everyone knows, the Modern Reader is going online to get news, to read and do research. But the newspapers, with their rag-tag budgets and cut-rate crews, are more and more tasked with only writing commercial stories for their sponsors. This is where we are carving our niche, and why. Welcome to new contributors, Caleb Cole, Mary Weathers and Dave Johnson.

This year, we’d like to hear more from you, our Gentle Readers. Feel free to post comments, site feedback, additional information we may have left out… and send us your story ideas. Help us expand our readership. This year, thanks to our Sys Admin Pastor Phil we’ve greatly vamped up our outreach, but you can help by befriending us on Facebook, where you can get notified of the latest postings. And don’t forget – we’re always interested in publishing new writers! And for those other seasoned writers, send us all the stuff that’s rejected by your editors…!

PS: There were NO entries this year for Eastern Taiwan Blogs!?
Best wishes for the new year, and thanks again,
The Wild East team o’ writers and staff.