I’m a fan of the Rolling Stones. I went to their “Bigger Bang” concert in Budapest and had a blast. One of my friends knows about this strange worshiping of sixty year olds. To celebrate this somewhat freaky phenomenon, she once bought me a Stones tie. This garment was supposed to give me a rock ‘n’ roll appearance. Truth be told, I hated the thing. Only wore it once, for…

Continue reading The Stones tie: why merchandise kills inspiration

I’ve been blogging on dutchproblogger.com for five months now. I’m delighted by the amount of comments and inspiring discussions, yet I’m not completely satisfied about a couple of things:

• Too personal – although this is my personal blog, I still want to offer more information that is relevant for every reader. Thus I’ll post more blog tips and less personal stories. Moreover, I’ve highlighted the last blog tip by featuring it…

Continue reading Keep yourself entertained: redesign!

Lenny Kravitz used to be my music hero. When I was seventeen, I had all his albums lined up in my CD rack – knowing them by heart. When I missed a holiday flirt, I used to listen to Again and when high school drove me nuts, Fly Away was the logical choice.

But during the last couple of years, this love has faded a bit. I started listening to…

Continue reading A Kravitz gig is like meeting the sexy ex

As you might have read on my Twitter page I’m currently in San Francisco to attend the Supernova 2008 conference with Patrick and Arjen. After my visit to the Web 2.0 Expo I didn’t expect to be here so soon again – yet as you can imagine: I don’t really mind!

Supernova is a conference that really digs deep in the theories behind the network age. That attracts an interesting…

Continue reading Supernova and meeting blog heroes

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s some music for the weekend! The Rumble Strips! My weekend actually hasn’t begun yet, as I’m working on the first chapter of my ebook about blogging. Earlier today, I interviewed Edwin van Mijsbergen from ZBdigitaal about the archive function of blogs. He said some interesting things, which I’ll share with you later. For now, I wish you an excellent weekend and hope to contribute to it…

Continue reading The Rumble Strips, another indie sensation

Yes that’s right, I’m working on an ebook and a conference about blogging. Both will be in Dutch, as I think the English speaking people have enough resources on their hand. Most Dutch people also speak English, yet I feel a local approach is the right way to go. There are major differences between the US and Dutch blogosphere, only the differences in size would be enough reason to go…

Continue reading An ebook and conference about blogging are coming up

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.…

Continue reading A twist on a classic brainstorming tool

Although I don’t know one word of Japanese, I did get an article published in the April 9th Edition of Fuji Sankei Business-i newspaper, which is being circulated to 200,000 readers a day nationwide. This is how it happened.

At the end of last March, I received an email from Masaru Ikeda. He’s running a system integration company in Tokyo and writes a weekly column about Internet innovations for the Sankei…

Continue reading How I got my first article in Japanese published

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…

Continue reading The self-destructive tendency of bloggers