What can the 1 million Belgium bloggers do for you?
Maarten Schenk, Six Apart. Blogging since 2002, that’s worth a t-shirt.
A lot has changed in a short time. Back in 2003 people thought it was either a forum, some sort of Geocities homepage or a community site. Nobody understood the purpose of RSS. But nowadays, the word weblog is in the daily news, all the major newspapers have blogs with RSS feeds, or are launching them as we speak. Companies treat bloggers like journalists… They’ve come a long way, and they’re here to stay.
Introduces ‘Blogoloog‘, a pet project that ran out of hand. Blogoloog is basically a rough project setup that runs on an old computer at Maarten’s little house. It has a full index of a number of Flemish blog services, and keeps lists of the blogs that have been updated recently. The list has been completed with ‘tips’ that have been dropped in Maarten’s comments.
Stats today:
40.000 blogs, between 9.000 or 12.000 outgoing links, 4000 daily blogposts…
Most of the blogs are hosted with free services. The backend of the state of the Flemish blogosphere looks like this (in order of all-aroundness): MSN Spaces, Skynetblogs, Bloggen, Blogger, Seniorennet are the most popular services. But, self-hosted blogs and foreign blog services are under-represented, so it’s difficult to keep track of the exact online activity.
MSN Spaces is overrepresented, because feeds of this service contain also the updates in picture galleries, which are very often more updated than the actual blogs.
A lot of popular blogs choose for self hosting, because they can avoid third party advertisement and by using paid services, they have more control over their uptime and the backend on which the blogs run.
The popular blogs of the Flemish blogosphere consist of small “blog clubs”, it’s the same people who react on each other’s blogs, add the same blogs to their blogroll… Much like it happens with the international A-listers.
The number of blogs keeps growing, because it’s become really easy to publish for anyone.