The Belgium Connection Maybe a Little Explained:

I love a mystery and it lookss like we still have one with the large readership in Belgium. Benjamin De Schrijver writes in to say that he may be some of the cause for multiple page hits but he would have to be opening his blog bookmarks page 25 or 35 times a day to be the sole reason for the high Belgium page hit percentage.

As far as I know, the animation community in Belgium isn't much bigger than anywhere else. There are - I think - 3 schools that teach animation, and I've heard of only one Belgians-only animation forum. I also don't know about too many animation studios here.

I think the biggest part of the Belgian community is more into independent, alternative animation, thanks to Raoul Servais, who was the founder of the most prominent animation school in Belgium. And on the CGSociety forums, I have the feeling that the community these days is more about rigging and vfx than about character animation.

One thing that might boost the postcount a bit is something else, though. I've got quite a list of blogs I visit daily, and I've all put them in a bookmarks folder in my Firefox browser. Because there are so many, reading all the new posts mostly takes more time than I want it to, if I visit only 1 time a day. So I've gotten in the habit of opening that bookmarks folder every time I start up or shut down my computer, so I usually don't spend over 5 to 10 minutes each time I read the blogs.

But of course this has as a result that I open a lot of blogs that haven't gotten any updates yet, which could lead up to a bigger Belgian visitors number than actually is the case. I don't know how many readers your site has, though, so I don't know if that could be responsible for as many as 6% of the total. Maybe I should start using RSS feeds more often?

Anyways, that's only one possibility. If that's the reason, sorry for the confusion, and please send an e-mail my way, so I can change my habit to RSS. If not, maybe I'm looking for the Belgian community in the wrong places, and you could hook me up with some e-mail addresses from the other mailing Belgians?

So sorry, or thanks ;-)

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Benjamin De Schrijver

P.S. Benjamin, don`t change your blog viewing habits. I will take the extra page hits. I don`t mind the inflated numbers as long as I am not the one inflating them. So tell me more about Raoul Servais. He sounds like a fascinating and important animator that I would like to know more about.  ¶ 6:24 AM