Commotion in the Belgian blogosphere

Yesterdag, the whole Belgian blogosphere was thrown into commotion. The reason? Metatale published its top 100 of most influential Belgian blogs. It is based on some kind of calculation, measuring the amount of entries a blogger posts, the comments a blogger gets on his blog or posts on other blogs etc. And of course, everybody is curious whether they are in the top 100 or not. And like always, some bloggers (usually the ones that are not in) question the analysis tool used, others praise it to heaven (usually because they are more popular than expected). At any case, the Belgian blogosphere was more alive than ever 🙂

And some more striking things:

•  About Metatale: my personal blog has a rank of 14 according to Metatale. Since the top 100 ends with rank 17, I’m not that far off this top. Especially because I hadn’t been posting that much lately, I was kind of surprised. So the logarithm has counted in my advantage 🙂
• About my company: A manager at my company is looking for an employee. She asked me to use my LinkedIn network to spread the word. I think it’s quite good that the management values social networks. Even though I think they’re pretty desperate to find a new employee (a market researcher, so in case you know anyone 😉

Team Flanders?

Tomorrow the Flemish minister president Kris Peeters is visiting our company Concentra. He will talk about the project ‘Vlaanderen in actie’, with which he wants to win the future of Flanders. Therefore he counts among others on the talents, the creativity and the innovative skills of the Flemish people, the excellent position of Flanders (in the middle of Western Europe) and the flexible Flemish government.  That’s at least what I read in the summary of the plan.

Our company will have some time to present innovative projects we are working on and my project HasseltLokaal is one of them. That’s why I am preparing a presentation right now. I will emphasize that HasseltLokaal brings people, clubs and schools together on a virtual platform and as such increaes social cohesion.

I will also mention that we’ve been working together with research groups from universities, other companies and the city of Hasselt, which makes the project quite unique. It is something I hear and read a lot (also in the Vlaanderen in actie plan): universities, companies and governments should cooperate a lot more instead of staying safely on their own islands. 

As a matter of fact, I also had a discussion about it at the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner with Ann Laenen of K&L. We concluded that lots of undertaking people in Flanders are very frustrated about the huge gap between those three entities. Innovation is hard like that, innovators have to climb a lot of mountains before the can achieve ‘something’.

Nevertheless, an interdisciplinary approach helps everybody. It’s something I see within the i-City project, in which the government, companies and young undertaking people meet. I’ve seen people building bridges there and as such making money – together. I do know that there’s a lot of potential in Flanders and that there are so many great ideas that maybe one day can be put in a business model. So the sooner there is a ‘team flanders’ the better, I suppose.