Popular Belgian blogs: the preliminary top 25

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:

1. 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
2. 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.
3. demuynck.org: 94689 hits
   Wouter is the creator of the Nucleus blog software and has an original visual linkblog called ‘Karma Universe’.
4. lvb.net: 72984 hits
   Luc Van Braekel, a high profile blogger, is regularly featured in major media
5. www.polskaya.be: 58162 hits
   If you thought all bloggers liked each other, this blog will prove you wrong.
6. blog.zog.org: 55390 hits
7. fuckhedz.com: 53255 hits
8. www.kapingamarangi.be: 46926 hits
9. www.domilog.be: 44756 hits
10. www.scene24.net: 43970 hits
11. www.jahsonic.com: 39429 hits
12. www.dominiek.be: 38864 hits
13. www.ruudsdesign.com: 35867 hits
14. www.eug.be: 34047 hits
15. www.zattevrienden.be: 31898 hits
16. www.middernacht.be: 25071 hits
17. www.internetjournalistiek.be: 23684 hits
18. pdw.blogspot.com: 22298 hits
19. huugendruug.blogspot.com: 20214 hits
20. laartje.skynetblogs.be: 10637 hits
21. www.baeyens.net: 9345 hits
22. www.rigoureus.be: 9341 hits
23. www.alog.be: 9086 hits
24. ge.bykr.org: 8993 hits
25. 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.