The Belgian weekly newsletter T-Zine has just published an article about the site of the Belgian National Institute of Statistics (N.I.S./I.N.S.). This government agency publishes census data on population, employment, investments, …
Quickly browsing through some numbers shows e.g. that Belgium has the lowest % of people working between 50 and 64 years old in the European Union (we’re at 40%, Sweden is at 72%), which might indicate that we allow ‘pre-pension’ (retiring at 50 or 55) too easily.
The site also have a very complete list of links to the world’s country statistics, so if you want to know
- how many inhabitants Belarus had in 2002 (9.940.000 - it’s way bigger than Ireland and I didn’t even have a clue where it was!)
- how popular mobile phones are in Malta ( 290.000 phones on a population of 395.000: 73% penetration rate - Belgium is at 83%)
- who the European Internet early and late adopters are (in 2001, Iceland had 69% of its citizens that were Internet users, Greece 13%)
it’s a great place to start. They even have a RSS newsfeed, I kid you not. Do not make fun of Belgian e-government.
On a related topic, I was trying to find out if this mentioning of the site in T-Zine had led to Belgian Blog activity.
Searching on Technorati and Feedster on ‘statbel‘ gave me nothing, so I started looking to other blog search engines.
The results:
| Search on … | ’statbel’ | statbel.fgov.be | George Bush (Reality check) |
Remarks |
| Blogdex | 0 | 0 | 25 results (only shows 1st 25) | Not really impressed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bloglines | 108 results | 108 results (same) | 36.981 results | Very thorough, I was suprised. |
| Feedster | 0 | 0 | 21.886 results | Unreliable (down 50% of the time) |
| Technorati | 0 | 15 results | 1.110 results (last 7 days) | Scored bad on keyword, but better on URL search |
| Waypath | 0 | 0 | 26.367 results | Looks nice, but not impressed with the results |
Basically the answer was: no recent related blog activity, but certainly the statbel.fgov.be site has been referenced in the past so Technorati and Bloglines seem to be the better sources for searching.
Next question I asked myself was: let’s say I wanted to limit this search to only Belgian blogs. How hard would that be?
- In Google one could use “site:.be“, but 1) Google is not ideal for blog-only search, and 2) not all Belgian bloggers have a .be domain (blogspot.com users, for one)
- Luk Van Braekel has a map of Belgian Bloggers @ lvb.net, but that list of Belgian blogs is not public and is not complete (currently 85 blogs - Luk, you can probably guess how I know ;-).
- Blogwise has a list of Belgian blogs, but you can’t search them and the list is not complete (currently 218 entries - LVBlog is not there)
- one can search on Dutch words like ’statistieken’ in order to limit the results to dutch-written blogs, but this might also include .nl blogs (God forbid) and excludes Belgian dudes that write in English (pompous bastards).
- none of the blog search engines supports geograpical searching
Makes one wonder, is there an opportunity for localised (European) blog search?
PS: I’ve added all the above mentioned blog search engines to my StereoSearch page.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or receive updates via email. Thanks for visiting!
0 Responses to “Searching blogs for local content”