State of the Dutch Blogosphere
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As most of you will know I'm Dutch. I'm Dutch and I'm a blogger. The Netherlands has over 16 million inhabitants of which
a very high percentage has access to the internet. This means there's also an enormous amount of Dutch weblogs. Many of
these weblogs are written in Dutch. So why am I blogging in English, one may wonder?
This weblog was founded in fall 2004 but I've been blogging for a lot longer. Somewhere in 2002 I started a collective weblog called kontverhaal.com. The weblog was doing pretty well at it's peak. In fact it got even more visitors than the weblog you're reading right now despite the fact that it's written in Dutch and therefore only readably by a relatively small amount of people. The weblog still exists and every once in a while a post appears (mostly placed by one of my fellow bloggers) but my own attention has shifted towards my English home on the net which happens to be this site.
A couple of days ago, the nomination round for the Dutch Bloggies started. The Dutch Bloggies are a nice initiative inspired by the international Bloggies awards. What happens during the elections is however completely different from how things go with the international elections. It has everything to do with the current state of the Dutch blogosphere.
The international blogosphere is about quality of content. When looking at the Technorati top 100 you'll find many sites on which you'll find something worth your time. Not all of them may interest you in terms of the subject(s) they cover but most of them will appeal to a fairly large audience. A second important aspect of the international blogosphere is the rise of the weblog networks. As you know I'm a proud member of one myself, the 9rules network. Again, quality of content is what counts. Not only for the 9rules network but for any weblog network.
The Netherlands don't have a Technorati top 100 and the Netherlands doesn't have weblog networks. I'm not even sure whether those would work at all. It seems the Dutch blogosphere is very much out of focus when compared to the international one. While quality content 'scores' internationally, the picture in the Netherlands is different. The largest weblogs in the Netherlands attract their audience with either linkdumping to 'funny things online' such as pictures, movies, jokes or (soft) porn resources. An even more prominent subject that attracts loads of visitors in the Dutch blogosphere is what I'd call 'shock content'. Content that doesn't tell an interesting story or move it's reader. Content that doesn't teach you how to do something interesting or increase your knowledge on a subject you may like. Of course such content is available within the Dutch blogosphere but it's not the content that gets most of the attention. The easiest way to 'score' when blogging in Dutch is either the beforementioned linkdumping but most important: posting content that insults, shocks or slanders other weblogs, institutions, companies and even individuals. Things aren't very different when it comes to those don't blog but post comments. It's not hard to attract insults or even threats when blogging in Dutch. Posting on a political or social subject in a (semi) critical way will almost guarantee you'll get some extremely nasty comments below your entry. It happened a couple of times on my Dutch weblog. I didn't like this at all as you'll probably understand. Ever since I started blogging in English, the only comments I've ever had to remove were spam comments. No insults, threats or otherwise unwanted comments have appeared here like they did on my Dutch blog. Yet quite a lot of Dutch people read and comment on my weblog. I guess the English keeps the unwanted people away. I can still blog on political subjects without having to deal with this crap. Most excellent indeed!
Last year's Dutch Bloggies were basically ruined because of another aspect of the Dutch blogosphere: the huge flock of 'followers' of the weblogs that engage in the slandering, insulting and otherwise non-constructive posting. Because of the huge amount of influence these sites have on their very large amount of readers they could very easily mobilize an army of people voting for them. This resulted in sites winning awards even in categories they weren't even supposed to be in because they have nothing to do with the topic of that category. This year the organization has made a wise decision by changing the rules in such a way that this 'army of voters' effect won't dominate the entire event like it did last year. Of course several sites are posting about how much the Dutch Bloggies 'suck' now as if the organization is now refusing to recognize the fact that these sites really are 'the best Dutch weblogs'. If that is true it's another fine reason not to blog in Dutch: I don't want to be part of any of that. I'll run a 'shitty weblog' with pride then. Maybe this year we'll actually get to know some new Dutch weblogs that are actually worth reading thanks to the Dutch Bloggies elections. They're out there, they're just not always easy to find.
As I stated at the beginning of this article, I'm Dutch and I'm a blogger. Yet I don't feel like 'a Dutch blogger'. Now you know why that is. My name is sort of known in the Dutch blogosphere because of my contributions to Pivot, which happens to be a popular weblog platform in the Netherlands. (I created an anti spam package and various themes and plugins) At this point I feel both the interesting writing AND the interesting commenting is happening outside of the Netherlands. Maybe one day even the Dutch will get sick and tired of the same old linkdumping, insulting or negative postings about immigrants and the importance of quality weblog content will rise. Until then I definitely won't waste my time on setting up a second weblog in my mother language.
P.S: Paul Scrivens, if you happen to read this, remember the idea I emailed you about a couple of months ago? Maybe 2006 is the right time for it...
At 05 January '06 - 02:08 Rogier wrote:
But seriously: I guess every country gets the weblogs it deserves.
At 05 January '06 - 03:04 Marco wrote:
But I guess you might be right… unfortunately….
At 05 January '06 - 03:18 stefan wrote:
The quality of postings on my english log is not what I want in myself, but I’ve been working more and more with drafts lately, putting down the general idea first and not publishing it until I at least took some more time to re-read and re-write. Even on my english log, I want to shift from the mix of linkdumping combined with original content to 90% original content with an occasional linkdump. And that’s all on my english log. I suspect my dutch log may even be taken down sooner or later since it’s collecting dust and spam comments at the moment.
At 05 January '06 - 03:18 Leo Kennis wrote:
1 – A semi-political one. If I have to describe the Netherland of the past two years it would be “negative”. Everything is, goes and will be bad or else worse. This is caused (I think) by the declining economy. This negative-ness has gotten hold of a part of you as a Dutchman too, I think. I think there is almost no reason whatsoever to be so negative about Holland. Holland isn’t worse nor better then most countries. The US also have their load of rotten logs that are popular, and every other country too. I don’t think the Netherlands are unique in their negative-ness.
2 – As a “simple statistical rule” larger countries have more weblogs. Most weblogs you link to or mention are American. There are almost 20 times as many Americans, so they have app. 20 times more weblogs. So for every good Dutch blog there are 20 good American blogs. To find good Dutch weblogs is 20 times harder. Since you are part of a America-based “good weblogs community”, I thinks you don;t notice the huge amount of crapweblogs that the Us also has.
So what I think is needed is a stronger community of good Dutch weblogs.
At 05 January '06 - 04:59 stefan wrote:
This is a very weird statement to make. If you consider your statement that the relationship between the number of good and bad weblogs is the same in the US as it is in NL, then shouldn’t it be just as easy to find a good dutch weblog as it is to find a good US weblog. For each good dutch weblog, there is the same amount of bad dutch weblogs as there are bad US weblogs for a good US weblog. Does that make sense?
I do think that you make a good point with your statement that maybe what is needed is a stronger community of good dutch weblogs. And maybe a good dutch weblog network would help here. Unfortunately I’ll add some doomthinking here, in that any such network might have a hard time starting because of the constant flame-commenting by certain dutch “shocklogs” which seems to happen a lot less in other countries. The “flooding” that is done by certain logs that I shouldn’t even need to mention by name of negative comments or sort-of DOS attacks that happens here seems to not happen often in other countries.
At 05 January '06 - 05:05 Marco wrote:
Quite a challenge I think!
At 05 January '06 - 05:44 Paul D wrote:
It sounds like the Dutch blogosphere could use some people like you to nudge things in the right direction. :)
At 05 January '06 - 13:38 Max Roeleveld wrote:
Anyhoo, I almost fully agree with you. I also think Leo has a point — the “market” of English-language blogs is way larger than its Dutch sibling. It’s not just the Americans, it’s the Brits as well, and the crapload of bloggers from various countries that decide to blog in English, just like you. So the 20:1 ratio is even more skewed. I do believe that it’s easier to find decent English blogs as they get more links, so they’re easier to “stumble upon”. And the non-native English bloggers usually take their blogs seriously, because, well, why else bother to blog in another language? Last but not least, the Dutch always lag behind a couple of years. Give it some time — you can already see some blogs go for quality. I’m going to try, anyway =]
As for the lack of community: I think that either a Dutch “branch” of 9Rules or some extension of the likes of About:Blank could work. Who cares if GeenStijl doesn’t approve? Worst case scenario: they flame it, you’ll get a couple of thousand eyeballs for a few days, or whatever their attention span is. Being “flamed into oblivion” might just last for a day or so. I could live with that. It also matters how you respond to it… I personally experienced that a relaxed attitude works. =]
The hardest part will be getting (and keeping) the manpower. I would like to see a real community take off here, but I also know that I cannot dedicate much time to it, and I think that goes for a lot of people. But if you find a crew of willing and able folks, who knows what could happen.
But that’s just my two cent’s worth. Now I’m off to translate that into Dutch. =]
At 06 January '06 - 17:59 Guest wrote:
At 07 January '06 - 00:36 Tibor wrote:
Linkdumping for example (for whatever it may stand for exactly) does not have to imply bad quality and can also be very informative.
For sure writing about politics (no matter in what language) helps attracting weirdo-commenters that can totally spoil the conversation. The worst case scenario is when blogs that are “posting content that insults, shocks or slanders other weblogs, institutions, companies and even individuals” tell their visitors to go and attack others: see Femke Halsema’s weblog as an example. I am quite sure there are examples like this in
Englishother langauges too though.Anyway, your post (and the comments!) helped me to decide that I should continue to try to keep on blogging in two languages.
Cheers.
At 07 January '06 - 00:38 Marco wrote:
It’s about constructive, high quality content which can be about any topic. Technology is just one of the enormous amount of possible subjects.
At 07 January '06 - 00:42 Tibor wrote:
At 07 January '06 - 00:46 Marco wrote:
They’ve got 1 terabyte (yes that’s right) of bandwidth per month in their cheapest package now so I guess they’re a great deal as well if you want to run one of those shock blogs
At 07 January '06 - 01:00 Tibor wrote:
But how low should your quality go to get those amounts of traffic?
At 07 January '06 - 01:04 Marco wrote:
At 07 January '06 - 02:00 Tibor wrote:
At 07 January '06 - 06:12 Verbal Jam wrote:
At 07 January '06 - 13:04 localhost wrote:
But it makes a lot of sense. Good story. The contest is kind of the same as ‘beste website van Nederland’ won by the Postbank. They sent mail to their customers to encourage them to vote. And there was a link on the frontpage. No wonder they won.
At 07 January '06 - 17:22 BOK wrote:
But as the spread of internet-connections in the Netherlands is relatively high, the cause-and-effect is going up at the same pace, so to speak.
I started blogging in Dutch (too), but nowaday it’s more a way of keeping up with technology and I use my blog for an occasional link or technical “discovery”. If I wasn’t blogging and keeping up with it, I would have missed stuff like RSS, RubyORails and AJAX.
Mooie lay-out / theme oerigens!
At 08 January '06 - 08:02 Tom wrote:
For a nice overview from the top 50 dutch weblogs you can view pcplein.nl (scroll down a bit) to view the top 50 based on alexa (yes the accuracy is questionable).
You will indeed see to much of those “funny stuff/insulting blogs”. I guess that says more about the interest of the dutch people than the ability of dutch people to write quality content. The fact that most good writers convert to English just confirms those facts. I guess writing about a specific subject like annevankesteren.nl for like 5 dutch readers is not really interesting.
For a long time I considered starting a blog myself. I’ve decided to go English for now. There are simply not enough dutch people who might be interested in the subjects I will write about.
As I’m writing I’m also developing some new “web 2.0” style projects to provide some dutch alternatives to popular sites like technorati, feedburner and 9rules. I will add my own flavor and unique features to those sites so I can hopefully help in kicking the dutch blogosphere to the next level :). I don’t want to look like a spammer so I will only post urls on request.
At 08 January '06 - 13:39 Marco wrote:
At 08 January '06 - 14:50 Tom wrote:
This might not seem a very innovative project but its more of a gathering tool of information. I will add features to this project as soon as I can come up with some relevant ideas. Features I plan to integrate in feedzilla or my new, bigger and better, project are: – rss print, gonna nicely layout feed overviews for printing and reading in the train – OPML import – searching in feeds – tag support – ping support – social bookmarking – much more.. :)
For my 9rules style site I had some idea of making some combination between 9rules and digg. Users decide which feeds and blogs appear in the network and the rest can be read in my feedzilla reader.
Any feedback is appriciated :)
At 22 February '06 - 12:07 moonfire wrote:
Ik blog sinds januari 2003 – eerst op Xanga (maar datwas me to claustrophobisch) en nu weer fris op blogspirit.com
Ik vind me meer in de internationale weblog wereld, waar het lijkt dat men creatiever, relaxter edoch serieuzer is.
Dus…
greetz,
moonfire
At 01 March '06 - 05:00 Sjors wrote:
At 21 March '06 - 06:02 cargawar wrote:
Here we go again… Even though I totally agree with Marco on his point of view on Dutch weblogs, I still think it’s a Don Quichotte attempt to “educate” readers.
It’s like trying to make the audience to go watch art house films instead of blockbusters. Make ‘em go read poetry instead of the funny papers. Or make ‘em listen to classical music instead of pop.
Is your Internet behaviour PC or not?
Shockblogging is the Rock ‘n’ Roll of the 21st century: rebellious and confronting.
However, I started out doing the same thing, with only one goal in mind: drawing the same size of crowd GeenStijl or VK was drawing by posting the most gruesome stuff on the net I could find. Sherlocking the net, searching for scoops. I once found one: I discovered the Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit) private tapes as first dutch blogger. How dissapointing it was when GeenStijl seemed to have found the same source as mine, one day later!, and getting all the props for it. So I aimed for extreme videos, like sick amputations or murders. All for the stats, never intended to make money on it. Although I do have a special adult-page now, where I tested some adult ads as well.
2 Years later I feel numb. I’ve seen the worst of the worst and there aren’t too many things that shock me enough to emote me. Occasionaly there are, but it becomes boring watching other people or species suffer, for camera’s sake. Same goes for pr0n: I’ve watched countless b00bs over the years. Call it an overdose. Too much pr0n. Too many sites with the same content. I still publish it on my site, just to keep some returning visitors satisfied I guess…
On the other hand, reading this post by Marco makes me wonder why the hell I’m trying to please a spoiled crowd. Why not please myself and turn my (restyled with a little help from Marco and Jeriko-) site into something to be proud of?
Your post had effect on me, Marco: it makes me think about things. Mission accomplished? Maybe one of these days you’ll check my site and find out your words had full effect. You never know…
At 21 March '06 - 06:11 Marco wrote:
Is that ‘quality’ ? Heck… I don’t know. I’m not pretending to be some sort of mr. knowitall who can tell the good stuff from the stuff that sucks but I guess there’s a general direction. Not easy to describe in words but yet easy to understand to most people. I’m trying to follow that particular direction myself. If you do the same I’m sure your blog will be great!
At 21 March '06 - 06:28 cargawar wrote:
I assumed it was a matter of first getting your own “crowd” and then turning into the direction you originally wanted to go, taking the audience with you.
Today I have about 200-300 uniques a day. Still not too many returning visitors. I’ve spent eons on searching the net for goodies. But what for?
Switching from Blogger to Wordpress was an eye opener I guess. Searching for themes I came across some beautifully styled sites (like www.wildvuur.com) and this one. Like I said in the previous comment, it just may be time to change course, my own…and I might even do it in english!
At 21 March '06 - 08:46 cargawar wrote:
I consider myself relatively left-wing-minded, (followed by) my goal was to put some contraweight in the dutch blogosphere that is infected with the influence of the right-wing sites GeenStijl
At 21 March '06 - 08:48 cargawar wrote:
At 27 March '06 - 03:29 solof wrote:
ps. dit is bedoeld als feedback.
At 27 March '06 - 03:58 Marco wrote:
Well… solof. First of all this feedback isn’t really on topic here because I don’t think we were discussing my English. Furthermore, even though I’m fully aware of the fact that my English isn’t perfect, it works fine for me and my readers. In fact you’re the very first visitor to make a remark about my (mediocre?) English language skills since I started this weblog in October 2004.
At 30 April '06 - 05:01 Gary wrote:
I’m a Canadian, and live in Montreal. I’m lucky enough to have a few Dutch friends, and I have to admit a great admiration for your country.
I hope to travel to the Netherlands next year, and look forward to discovering your country.
I’ve developed ( thanks to my friends) , a rather heavy addiction to stroopwafels and snert – and am actually trying to learn a bit of Dutch.
Every Canadian I have ever talked to that has been to your country has spoken of the warmth and friendship they were treated with while visiting there – both in times of war, and in times of peace.
There will always be a special bond between our two countries, based on that blood both our peoples shed liberating your country during WW2.
I think all the men and women that died doing that would be so proud to see what that sacrifice brought about.
Tot ziens,
Gary
At 10 May '06 - 01:07 eric Johnson wrote:
Why?
Most don’t have that much to say.
If they have something to say, most don’t have the tenacity to keep it up.
If they keep it up, for a while, the blogger will:
1. Become bored.
2. become tired of the miserable lot who blog and respnd to blogs.
3. GW Bush will no longer be president from 2009. Given that most blogs are anti-Bush tirade sheets, his departure will remove the greatest part of the interest in blogs.
4. People eventually grow up and realize that thgey don’t have or need to comment on everything or even most things. So the 15-minutes of fame element will quickly evaporate.
5. Once people realize that their Blogs are not being read, they’ll lose interest.
6. People will realize that if they don’t really care what other bloggers say about anything, most people will probably give up their blogs in favor of: jobs, household chores, children, spouses, sex and hobbies.
At 10 May '06 - 03:54 cargawar wrote:
Line up 100 Northern Americans and let 1 of them be a Canadian: I’ll pick this one out blindfolded. I’ve travelled a lot and met many Canadians on numerous occasions: they’re a warm and kind breed. Propz!
Now, your statement on the future of blogging struck the nerve. I’ve been blogging for two years myself and I became bored indeed of blogging. Not only did it keep me focussed on the darker side of human kind most of the time (which resulted in a somewhat negative outlook on life), trying to keep up with the hitrate most shock-blogs have wore me out. Trying to be an original is the keyword. But is that really, REALLY possible? I think not. How does one become an original blogger? By writing about original content. But it looks like everything has been said.
The alternative would be designing an original layout that attracts both you and your audience. That would require master skills in webdesigning, which most of us don’t have.
So, there’s a lot of garbage among the blogs around.
They’re either “same same but diferent” content/layout-wise or they’re simply terrible reading.
Ofcourse there are plenty of blogs around that make the difference, but these will be the blogs you won’t find browsing the most common blogs’ links-sidebar.
You’d have to be lucky to come across an interesting one. You’ll find that these (appealing) blogs won’t have many hits in their stats. Which sometimes will result in the death of a blog (If no one cares to read my blog, why would I keep the blog up?).
And then again: it’s in the eye of the beholder.
I admit huge amounts of blogs will cease to exist once the Bush administration has its final hour. But who says the next president of the USA won’t be a bigger dumb ass than the one they have now? After all: about 50% of the americans voted for that joker. Or so they claim.
At 10 May '06 - 04:23 Marco wrote:
To throw in my own 5 cents: I don’t think blogging is going to be a thing of the past. Sure, blogging is a hype right now and the internet is full of meaningless little blogs by people who have merely jumped on the hype bandwagon. These are the kind of people wo don’t really have anything to say that will interest anyone except for close relatives and friends. They’ll discover that blogging takes quite a lot of time and lose interest once they find out hardly anyone is reading what they write. The more blogs of this kind, the less people that will actually read them.
However… I don’t expect people who blog about things that interest a much wider range of people besides relatives and friends are going to stop blogging any time soon. In the 21st century everyone is a publisher of text, imagery and even video. This phenomena is here and I strongly believe it’s here to stay. It’s definitely not tied to whatever politician is running the show in whatever country. There’s always new things to blog about. That’s the nice thing about it.
At 10 May '06 - 04:28 cargawar wrote:
At 10 May '06 - 04:32 Marco wrote:
At 11 May '06 - 03:44 eric Johnson wrote:
Cargawar…
I am an American expat in my 20th year of involvemet with and living, studying and working in Hollland and Germany.
I speak and read Both Dutch and German well, and although I do make grammatical mistakes from time to time, my letters to P.H. Donner in 2003 and W. Kok in in 2000, as well as the written explanation of a big problem I had after buying a car in Holland were all quite readable.
As far as other-than-American blogs go, I am familiar enough with Dutch additions to the internet to be able to say this…
No offense intened to you, but Dutch internet commentary is often the rudest, meanest and most disdainful of any, no matter if you look on the newsgroups, the original blogs (another reason I think blogs will die. Usenet is dead, why is blogging any different? HTML, Color and frames?) blogs por websites.
And with regard to your prediction for the future of blogging, you say, “I don’t expect people who blog about things that interest a much wider range of people besides relatives and friends are going to stop blogging any time soon. “
Are you not talking about a
websiteon a particular subject?BTW, what is the difference between a website and a blog?
try http://www.marijuananews.com..
Is this a blog or a website?
Finally, Blogs and blogging will disappear because blog is an ugly word.
At 11 May '06 - 04:10 Marco wrote:
I couldn’t agree more. This is exactly why I gave up on blogging in Dutch. Since I’m blogging in English I get 99,9% nice and insightful comments such as the ones in this thread. The English seems to be a very good way to keep those idiots out of my comment form.