I think that with a list of 500 blogs, a China Blog “newbie” who comes along, or someone outside the echo chamber of the China Blogosphere, will be overwhelmed by the sheer unfiltered (i.e. active vs inactive, great vs. good vs. mediocre) quantity. Chinalyst and Hao Hao represent a good companion approach, but as I said, they end up with (at least for me) more content to filter through, deciding what to read. I suppose this just reflects my situation–having increasingly less time to sort through which posts I’d like to read, nor wanting to wait for the Web 2.0 interaction to reveal which posts are “the best,” based on reader response, and so on.

Tag clouds and directories aren’t bad, but they’re ultimately “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive.” You might end up with umpteen categories lists for the same thing, maybe “living in china,” “china living,” “china life,” “life in china,” “what it’s like in china,” and so on, all for posts that could fall into a single category. The reader still has to sort through those.

Probably a “CBML” approach would be taking it too far (China Blog Markup Language), just to standardize, but–I’m just speaking as a single reader–I would rather read something more centralized that deals only in what we might equate to “Today’s Top China Blog Posts” over the various categories like I mentioned above.

Realistically, though, this would require a funded business approach to things…so I guess in the end I’m just wishing something like that existed too. Not ‘instead of’, but ‘too’. Chinalyst and Hao Hao and CBL are all great resources. What I’m pining for would be a great “more mainstream” format alternative, but not literally MSM Mainstream. (Weird. We’ve reached the day when something “mainstream” would be the “alternative” media.)

One Chinalyst suggestion: The ability customize a newsfeed to include/exclude certain blogs–with all blogs selected by default, but a user could sign in and clear the boxes of the ones they don’t want included in their customized feed.

That said, I like what you’re doing with Chinalyst, and it’s not likely to disappear from my RSS Reader any time soon.

Best regards,

Mark

Regarding China-blogging, I’d just like to made a couple’o comments :
Some of the 500 blogs in China-blog list are inactive. The number of active China bloggers is a lot smaller than you think, and their combined posting rate isn’t that high. China blogs are sometimes written by expats coming to China which are closed when the expats leave. I think “managing” them might no be such a big task, if we only consider current activity.

Categorizing China-blogs is something doable and there are a few way to do that. Chinalyst does it through blog owner free tagging sorted into a tag-directory (http://www.chinalyst.net/directory) or a tag cloud (http://www.chinalyst.net/tagadelic/chunk/3) which might give you an overview of categories for blogs. It is possible, naturally, to sort it by hand into several unique categories. Would you consider that a more powerful feature? (it’s kind’o old fashion anti-Web2.0 )

Good luck …