The Belgian Blogosphere is the total collection of all blogs 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. Popular topics include technology, current events and photography. Some of the most popular blogs are so-called linkblogs. Their maintainers publish links to hot on line items on an almost hourly basis.

Belgian Bloggers use a myriad of 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 co-founder of Belgian based blogging platform Skynetblogs and 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.

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 [201]), De Derde Belg, 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 established Belgian media picked up the hype. At the same time, the number of blogs exploded with Skynetblogs service presented by Belgian ISP Skynet.

Statistics

According to Blogium. A Blogdex like site created and maintained by Luc van Braekel there are 20711 Belgian Blogs. (12 june 2005)

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

100,0% http://www.coolios.net

87,0% http://www.zattevrienden.be

75,4% http://dof.skynetblogs.be

73,6% http://demuynck.org

56,0% http://fuckhedz.com

48,5% http://veerle.duoh.com

41,6% http://lvb.net

37,5% http://www.kapingamarangi.be

30,5% http://mathibus.com

28,0% http://www.scene24.net

Groupblogs

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

Cityblogs 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 cityblog is Gent Blogt. Others followed like the most recent being Turnhout blogt.

In the wake of groupblogs several bloggers developped aggregated blogs. These are based on the feeds of other Belgian blogs.