Mathemagenic

Peter Breuls on Dutch BloggerCon (via Kaye Trammel)

For a few months, a thought has been growing in my head: why don't organise a local BloggerCon? Just do what Dave does, but in the Netherlands, discussing Dutch topics. It might stimulate the local blogosphere, give bloggers a chance to explore what everyone is blogging about, and why...

I have posted this idea to my blog a few times, and I got positive response. So I actually would like to try it. But where to start? What should the topics be? Do we have a location? Webcast facilities?

There are things happenning in The Netherlands - BlogWalk 1.0 was in Enschede. It wasn't Dutch or about Dutch or in Dutch, it was international, but here locally. It's so funny that we always know better people and initiatives overseas than something that happens at home :)

There is an interesting overview of Dutch blogs:

I know there's some politicians in Holland blogging, but only a very few are actually blogging. One of our ministers, Gerrit Zalm, only keeps a boring diary, while the leader of the Socialist Party is keeping a real, more than daily updated, blog. A question to talk about: what should politicians blog about? They have a channel to their voters, to the people. Doesn't it make sense that they use it to communicate with the public?

A lot of Dutch weblogs have a personal touch. They should, but it's all lifelogs. Stories about what happened in someone's life, what they dreamed about, small fictional stories.. Other blogs are only linkdumping. They provide links to open dirs, funny movies, funny pictures, online games, and so on. Only a very few blogs are commenting on politics, media, the news and more like that. Why is that? Why are so few bloggers actually using their blog to comment on the world? Don't we all have opinions? Do we rather discuss them in real life?

I know many Dutch bloggers blogging "to comment on the world", they just do it in English. I guess it's matter of critical mass (e.g. Elmine's story of switching into English). This would be an interesting topic to discuss...

See also: Dave Winer would join Dutch BloggerCon.

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk