Belgian blogosphere

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Belgian blogosphere is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs as a community or social network, related to Belgium or created and maintained by Belgian citizens. The Belgian blogosphere is divided into several communities based on language. Common languages used are: Dutch, French and English.

Most Belgian bloggers blog about their daily lives but there are also themed blogs like e.g.Kunstemæcker. Popular topics include technology, current events and photography. Some of the most popular blogs are so-called linkblogs, where authors/developers publish links to hot online items, on an almost hourly basis.

Some Belgian bloggers use myriad content management systems to publish their musings on the world wide web. There are also a number of Belgians involved in the creation of such systems, e.g. Maarten Schenk who is a representative for Six Apart in the Benelux; Wouter Demuynck who created the Nucleus blogging platform, and Dries Buytaert who is the founder of the Drupal platform.

1 History
2 Belgian blogservices
3 Statistics
4 Group blogs
5 Blog dinners

[edit] History

Belgian blogging is a fairly recent phenomenon. The oldest Belgian blogs still active today can be dated back to as early as 1999 (Nukleos) and 2001 (Polskaya, Kwaadbloed, Verhelst, Lochtienk, Smintjes) according to their archives. Other currently or partially inactive blogs of note are Le temps perdu, Karma Universe (winner in the first ever Dutch Bloggies [1]), dederdebelg, Uren Dagen Nachten and Hank. Closely related to the Dutch blogosphere, popular memes in those days were the low-tech-hack, the blog-trading-cards and the first open-source personality Jan De Vries.

Blogging in Belgium really took off between 2004 and 2005. 2004 was a breakthrough year as Belgian mainstream media picked up the hype. At the same time, the number of blogs exploded with Skynetblogs service presented by Belgian ISP Skynet.

[edit] Belgian blogservices

Apart from blogger and similar worldwide blogservices, Belgian telecommunications providers Telenet and Belgacom offer similar services to their customers in Belgium.

Skynetblogs is operated by Belgacom's Skynet and was inaugurated May 27th, 2003.
Telenetblogs is operated by Telenet and was inaugurated November 17, 2005. This blogservice runs on the TypePad platform. Although TypePad is a paying service, everyone can get a free subscription to a Telenetblogs account.

[edit] Statistics

According to Blogium, a Blogdex-like site created and maintained by Luc Van Braekel, there are 20,711 Belgian blogs. (12 June 2005)

These are the 10 most popular blogs according to blog.forret.com. (14 February 2005)

There are several initiatives to create maps with the location of bloggers. Belgian blogger Polskaya has a developed a blogmap. Another map with the location of Belgian bloggers was created using frappr.

[edit] Group blogs

A recent development are group blogs. These blogs are not maintained by one author but rather a group of bloggers. Several Belgian group blogs were launched in 2004, amongst them het struikgewas.

City blogs ("stadblogs") are blogs created and maintained by one or more bloggers that live in the same village, town or city. The topics in these blogs are related to that city. The first Belgian city blog was Gentblogt, followed by (amongst others):

Note that group blogs are not to be confused with aggregated blogs (e.g. Planetgent, Planet Grep or Planet Ugent), which are based on the feeds of other Belgian blogs.

[edit] Blog dinners

An increasingly trendy activity in which Belgian bloggers engage are blog dinners. One blogger organises a dinner and invites his fellow bloggers. Mostly they take place in restaurants. As almost everyone is free to take part in a blog dinner, the audience they attract is quite varied. It ranges from lifeloggers to research journalists.