With hat tips and congratulations, the 10 Magazine poll asking readers' favorite Korean blogs is over. With that goes an odd sort of voting - only one blog could be chosen as 'the best', and three blogs taking a majority of the vote. Considering there's 'over 300 English blogs on Korea' according to 10 Magazine (I read almost 100 of them myself), that's a bit surprising. There's nothing really at stake, and frankly I have no need to satiate my ego by a poll.

Since I was a bit curious about the numbers, though, I decided to download the Alexa Toolbar and see what their rankings were for each of the blogs mentioned. In case the name is unfamiliar, Alexa "computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service." For more information about their methodologies, go here. Since few websites / blogs publicly disclose the number of hits they get, this seemed like the most neutral (e.g. least biased) way to satisfy my personal curiosity. There are a few hiccups within the data, but exclude the outliers and there's actually some interesting things to look at.

The aforementioned poll was kind enough to put the URL in parentheses, which I copied and pasted into the address bar. Once the website / blog loaded, I noted the Alexa ranking as indicated on the installed toolbar, as of this post (18 March 2010). For your viewing pleasure (remember lower rankings = higher traffic numbers; note these numbers likely change frequently)...

The Marmot's Hole (rjkoehler.com) 5% - #69,277

Chris in South Korea (chrisinsouthkorea.blogspot.com) 2% - #261,743

The Grand Narrative (thegrandnarrative.wordpress.com) 2% - no rank [huh?!]

Zen Kimchi (zenkimchi.com) 3% - #227,270

Brian in Jeollanam-do (briandeutsch.blogspot.com) 6% - #80,522

Gusts of Popular Feeling (populargusts.blogspot.com) 3% - #320,744

Eat Your Kimchi (eatyourkimchi.com) 5% - #342,059

Korean Modern Literature in Translation (ktlit.com) 14% - #4,798,177

Seoul Eats (seouleats.com) 3% - #188,225

Korean Rum Diary (koreanrumdiary.blogspot.com - Rated PG-13 for profanity.) 5% - #398,176

Ask The Expat (asktheexpat.blogspot.com) 1% - #221,051

An Idiot's Tale (yankeenom.blogspot.com -Rated PG-13 for profanity.) 18% - #248,655

Korea Beat (us.asiancorrespondent.com/korea-beat) 2% - #35,628 [based on the asiancorrespondent.com domain name, so it's not just KB's blog making the rank higher]

Six in Seoul (sixinseoul.weebly.com) 24% - #799 [rank for weebly.com, not the Six in Seoul blog specifically]

Ruby Clicks (rubyclicks.blogspot.com) 1% - no rank

ESL Teacher Time (eslteachertime.blogspot.com - Rated PG-13 for profanity.) 1% - #14,269,016

You Can't Hold Me Responsible for This (joseph-gutierrez.com - Rated PG-13 for profanity) 2% - #12,334,085

Rip City To Seoul (ripcitytoseoul.wordpress.com) 3% - #2,901,299