Hi! This is one of the first times you've visited my personal blog. Welcome! You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep in touch. I look forward to your comments!

Number 1 tip to stay fit and prevent RSI is to keep moving. You gotta just do more than just making a walk to the coffee machine. You have to use your muscles and start sweating a bit. Play ping-pong, fussball or.., make up your own game. That’s exactly what we did at the Meganova office.

When I was at Le Web 3 in Paris, I found a pink stress relief ball in my goodie bag. At first, I just used it for what it’s meant for: that means squeezing the ball to relief stress. Yet after a while, the guy whose sitting in front of me - Sander van der Vliet - started throwing the ball trough the office. That’s when the poor little pink ball received its first kick. It soon evolved into a real game: Bottle Soccer. It looks something like this:

Photos by Bram Kok

Yesterday I wrote a review about Checkser, a sort of Wikipedia-style checklist database. Guess what kind of checklist I made when I was testing the service?

When we launched The Next Web on January 7 this year, we got TechCrunched right-a-way. That not only caused a lot of traffic, it also made my mailbox flood. I remember it seemed like every start-up mailed me a PR request that night. Still every day, I find an amount of new emails I would have never thought to receive on a daily basis. I had to find a way to deal with all these electronic letters, so I turned myself to David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

He gives some good tips about handling email, some of which you can read on 43Folders. Yet when you’re a blogger, checking your mail is a slightly different story. So I started thinking about a good way to process my mail, and this is what I came up with. Read the rest of this entry »

Just wrote an article for The Next Web about VIDDIX, a new service that combines video and web content. Your video is playing at the left, while web content is popping up at the right. Where YouTube and Slideshare end, VIDDIX is just about to get started. Co-founder Sébastien Willems interviewed me to test his service. Unfortunately it’s in Dutch, so only you Dutchies out there are able to understand the interview. Don’t worry though, the service itself is way more important. I think it has the potential to become a big success. Read here why.

On The Next Web, we try to give our articles a hip and stylish look by using Flickr pics instead of just another logo. Or as a visitor once said in the comments: “Tryin’ too hard to be cool and artsy”. Well, I think we’re doing pretty good job, you may judge for yourself.

Anyway, I’ve stumbled upon two handy plugins that make being ‘cool’ and ‘artsy’ with Flickr pics even easier. One for Wordpress and one for iPhoto. Read the rest of this entry »

There it is, yet another blog! Number 3 for me, yet this will be a completely different story than The Next Web and Spotlight Effect. This is the place where I can write whatever I want, whenever I want. But to keep it interesting for a large crowd, I’ll also post blog tips regularly. You can expect the following types of posts:

• How to-posts. Yeah I’ll do the ‘how to’ thing as well. Not to make it to the Digg frontpage though, but to exchange my knowledge about blogging and managing your online identity.
• Culture. Whenever I’ve visited a movie, play or concert I’ll share my experiences here.
• Backgrounds. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to interview some big shot. In January for example, I interviewed Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. You can read the result on The Next Web. I think it will be fun and interesting to from now on write about how the interview went, where we met and how nasty the PR lady was.
• Anything cool I stumble upon on the web, streets and the crazy yet awesome office I work

Some personal blogs I really like are written by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Seth Godin, Polle de Maagt, Erwin Blom and Jaap Stronks (Most of them are Dutch). They’ve inspired me and I will give that inspiration my own twist, hoping that this ‘just another Wordpress blog’ will be interesting for you!

This month has been rather hectic so far. Reason for this is the Open Office Road trip I’m making with my colleagues from The Next Web. Check out this video with Patrick and me in which we explain what this is all about. It was shot at OpenCoffee Paris.