Luc Van Braekel has developed a service called Blogium.be, to find new emerging ‘hot’ links on the front pages of Belgian blogs. His start database is obviously a big list of URLs of Belgian bloggers. I think that a good additional function of Blogium could be to display a ranking of these, ordered by some kind of meta-calculation over things like: Google Pagerank, #incoming links for all search engines, posting recency/frequency (so deserted blogs disappear from the ranking in time), intra-belgium link traffic, …
Let’s set up a conceptual demo: I take a list of 50 Belgian/Flemish blogs, and use a tool called the ‘Link Popularity Check’ (via Xander) to check the # of incoming links. First some important disclaimers:
- my tiny list is by no means complete or representative, these are the blogs I know, or that I have come across. Luc’s told me he’s got 10s of thousands blogs in his list, maybe by now already 100s.
- Incoming links/link popularity is not the only defining criterium one should use to quantify ‘importance’. It was just an easy one to check.
- URL stuff: because of the way the tool works, I cannot include blogs that don’t have their own domain. Also, xyz.be links are not the same as www.xyz.be links. I typically took the one with the highest numbers, I did not add the numbers.
- I did not include sites like saait.be or zurf.be, because they are not a blog. No feed, no blog.
- Some blogs are in English, some in Dutch. If you write in English on topics like web design, and you really know your shit, you might end up a very popular site (as can be witnessed below). If you write in Dutch about fishing shrimp in the North Sea, tough luck.
And the top 25 is:
- www.coolios.net: 149328 hits
Probably the only shockblog we have that comes close to the Dutch competition (Flabber/VolkomenKut /GeenStijl): naked women and funny movies - veerle.duoh.com: 101136 hits
Veerle’s Blog has the most referenced non-shock blog, with articles on web design and advanced CSS. I knew she was good, but not that she was this good. - demuynck.org: 94689 hits
Wouter is the creator of the Nucleus blog software and has an original visual linkblog called ‘Karma Universe’. - lvb.net: 72984 hits
Luc Van Braekel, a high profile blogger, is regularly featured in major media - www.polskaya.be: 58162 hits
If you thought all bloggers liked each other, this blog will prove you wrong. - blog.zog.org: 55390 hits
- fuckhedz.com: 53255 hits
- www.kapingamarangi.be: 46926 hits
- www.domilog.be: 44756 hits
- www.scene24.net: 43970 hits
- www.jahsonic.com: 39429 hits
- www.dominiek.be: 38864 hits
- www.ruudsdesign.com: 35867 hits
- www.eug.be: 34047 hits
- www.zattevrienden.be: 31898 hits
- www.middernacht.be: 25071 hits
- www.internetjournalistiek.be: 23684 hits
- pdw.blogspot.com: 22298 hits
- huugendruug.blogspot.com: 20214 hits
- laartje.skynetblogs.be: 10637 hits
- www.baeyens.net: 9345 hits
- www.rigoureus.be: 9341 hits
- www.alog.be: 9086 hits
- ge.bykr.org: 8993 hits
- verhelst.blogspot.com: 8967 hits
So, this was the first test. I think I’m gonna do a second trial next week. Your suggestions, additions, corrections are welcome at peter.forret _at_ gmail.com. If you, like me, think this could be a nice upgrade to Blogium, leave a note on this blog. If there’s enough interest, I think Luc could be convinced.
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I’m already convinced
The question is: do we take into account all incoming links (like Google does), or do we only take into account incoming links from other blogs (like Technorati does)? For Blogium, the easiest solution would be to count the incoming links from other Belgian blogs. This would, however, give some ‘unfair’ disadvantage to Belgian blogs that are popular on an international level, but are relatively unknown in Belgium.
Another question: do you also take the blogroll of a blog into account, or do you only count links from within the articles of a blog?
At this moment, Blogium is just a “link discovery mechanism”, based on blogs but mainly targeted towards non-bloggers and collecting non-blog links. It’s looking outward. Looking inward can be interesting, but it will result in more “blog wars”.
And I don’t agree with your “no feed, no blog”. I know blogs that have no feed. For me, a blog is a collection of chronologically ordered articles, each article having a date stamp, and the blog having an overview page which is more than a linked list of titles. At least part of the articles should be visible from the overview page.
Luc
http://lvb.net – http://www.blogium.be