During a very hectic Web 2.0 Expo week in New York City, I did luckily find some time to work on my Dutch ebook about blogging. Chapter two concerns blogs and communities and I figured social media guru Erwin Blom was the man to interview about this material. So while enjoying a couple of beers in an Irish pub, we discussed whether blogs are communities or not.

We had a hard time coming to a solid conclusion. Sure, if you follow…

Continue reading Building a community on your blog with Yahoo Pipes

How can you use your corporate blog to promote your company? Even when you don’t have anything to blog about company-wise? Last week I interviewed Yakov Sadchikov from visual search engine Quintura, a Russian-based start-up, about these questions. He surely knows the answers to them, as his corporate blog is often featured on major tech news outlets like Techmeme and TechCrunch.

Good corporate blogging leads to indirect benefits

“In general, the company releases a new service or version once every…

Continue reading 7 essential tips for corporate bloggers who want to write remarkable content

There’s a weird contradiction surrounding Twitter. If you’re a heavy user, most of your social life consists of the conversations on the microblogging service. Yet when you go to a random bar, nobody in there knows about the damn tool. It’s everything and nothing at the same time.

Now let’s think of a your blog as a bar. The percentage of people knowing about Twitter is probably somewhat higher than in an average bar - yet most of your readers…

Continue reading Twitter? Never heard of it…, want a beer?

Yesterday Edial Dekker and me had a couple of beers in Amsterdam’s most interesting cafe, De Engelbewaarder (The Angelkeeper). We were discussing our upcoming blog conference BLOG08 and tried to think of original ways to promote the whole thing. In order to get a good brainstorm vibe going on, I made two groups of four coasters and asked Edial to write up four PR ideas. I did the same thing. After that, we presented the ideas one by one and perfected or…

Continue reading A twist on a classic brainstorming tool

As promised, I sometimes just cover random blogging thoughts here. Like things I stumble on when working, reading, or - most of the times - when relaxing. So today I realized that the most self-destructing thing you can do as a blogger is writing when don’t feel like it. Here’s why.

Let’s start with one hell of a cliché: blogging is about passion. Sorry, you may have heard that a hundred times now, yet - as always with clichés - it IS…

Continue reading The self-destructive tendency of bloggers

A few minutes ago, I met with Khris Loux at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Khris is the energetic and supercool founder of Js-kit, a service that offers rich and interactive services for web sites. We know each other from the Next Web Conference, where he gave a keynote speech about widgets and open standards.

He showed me some of the features, of which in my opinion Score stands out. It allows visitors to give a thumbs up or down. Simple, effective…

Continue reading Use JS-kit’s tools to express your wishes

When you’re a tech blogger, you can’t afford to miss the infamous pre-conference meet-ups. Those are the ideal places to meet start-ups and influentials who can tell you the latest about developments in the web industry. Moreover, if your blog isn’t all too famous yet, meet-ups are perfect for getting the word out. So how can you make the most of these events?

Boris and me are in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo and are visiting a lot of…

Continue reading Make the most of pre-conference meet-ups

Photo service Flickr is an almost endless source for beautiful, grungy, business, artsy or hip pictures. Since their archives contain literally billions of photos, you’ll find pictures about any given subject. So, if you’re running a non-commercial site, why would you mind buying photos at iStockphoto or risk some serious suing by violating copyrights? Just browse to flickr.com and discover the plethora of creative highlights.

Whenever I talk with bloggers about visuals in their publications, I always advice them to use Flickr.…

Continue reading A 5-step manual to use Flickr for stock photos in a proper way

All the bloggers immediately know what I’m talking about if I start complaining that readers don’t comment. A famous study by Jakob Nielsen in October 2006 showed that only one percent of a blog’s visitors contribute to the comments section on a regular basis:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

So when you’ve faced this fact, there are a couple of things…

Continue reading Getting readers to comment by writing an unfinished blog post

The last couple of months I’ve covered three conferences for The Next Web: Le Web 3 in Paris, LIFT08 in Geneva and Plugg in Brussels. Before that, I didn’t really supplied my readers with live coverage. So when I opened my macbook in Paris, I was pretty surprised by the energy and the attention conference blogging asks. You have to listen, write and think about what the speaker is saying at the same time. Moreover, people expect you to post soon pretty fast…

Continue reading How I prepare for conference blogging