As a blogger you have to read a lot, scan hundreds of short articles and write up your thoughts immediately. So there’s hardly any time left to really think about the bigger picture. Is this making us superficial?

Today I didn’t feel that good and was too tired to do some serious Web 2.0 reporting for The Next Web. On a normal Sunday – after an easy start – I read…

Continue reading Am I becoming superficial?

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…

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

Imagine two girls on stage, rubbing each other’s asses, asking the audience to shout “fuck!”, lifting their skirts while dancing and singing a song about a night they were so drunk that performing any sexual acts was impossible. It would be one embarrassing show right? I mean, look what it did for Britney Spears. But you know what, French girls can get away with it. Only if it was just…

Continue reading Nouvelle Vague: French women get away with everything!

Everyday I highlight an article worth reading for bloggers and web-savvies, have look at the archive here

Gapingvoid lands a book deal…

It’s been twenty years when Hugh McLeod started drawing his “squiggly” cartoons and a decade when he decided to draw them on the back of business cards. It was the consequence of a “creative bug” he had. For him, this bug led to a lot of great work and…

Continue reading Article of the Day: Sexy and cash jobs, lessons from a gifted cartoonist

I love the United States. I love movies. I love Amsterdam. I love the beauty of lost glory. It all comes together in this pic I’ve made:

Continue reading Videotheque The Kinker, for the newest American films!

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…

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

This feels good, while watching Diggnation I noticed that a story I wrote about Kevin Rose made it to the frontpage of world’s largest social bookmarking service: Digg.com. It’s a story about the plans of Kevin with Digg, he’d like to add a recommendation feature. This is certainly a milestone in my blogging career.

Continue reading First time a story by me hits the Digg frontpage!

Speakers’ dinner

Continue reading Some photos I made at the Speakers Dinner & day 1 of the Next Web 2008

Today I’m at the Transformatorhuis to help preparing this impressive and industrial building for The Next Web Conference. To be honest with you, for me it comes down to writing blog posts about the conference, taking pictures and showing some start-ups the way. Fun work though, and I’m pretty excited about witnessing the organization of such a big event from the inside. How excited, well…, a photo says more than…

Continue reading The Next Web makes me jump (and I’m not alone)