Am I becoming superficial?

13 April 2008

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?

The Long Now, picture by Laughing SquidToday 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 my feeds, empty my inbox and write a couple of stories. Today I only wrote one about my upcoming trip to San Fransisco. When I sensed this was going to be it for today, I decided to read the articles I had saved on Instapaper.

So I’ve read some really interesting stories. Like The Zen of Blogging by Hunter Nuttall and People power transforms the web in next online revolution by Charles Leadbeater. I also turned a few pages of Everything bad is good for you, an eye-opening book by Steven Berlin Johnson, a guy I really admire for his work.

All this captivating stuff got me thinking, and not just about the content. The thorough analysis and deep thoughts of the writers made me wonder if I wasn’t getting a bit too superficial. Since I was only trying to keep up with the fast pace of the technology industry and hardly saved any time for slower thinking. Continue reading →

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

11 April 2008

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.

Green photographerWhenever I talk with bloggers about visuals in their publications, I always advice them to use Flickr. Which they all do. Moreover, as big shots like Seth Godin also preach the Flickr evangelic, the use of Flickr pictures is now widespread. Yet not everybody gets it right.

The most common mistakes are 1, using pictures that are not licensed under Creative Commons and 2, not giving the photographer credit for his or hers picture. The latter is worse, since you miss out on three things:

  • When you link to the original photo page, you send your visitors on a exciting journey through the astonishing archives of Flickr. They’ll be thankful for that.
  • Giving the photographer credits is good for his reputation. More people will find his work, maybe hire him, which enables him to shoot even more great photographs. Because of you, creativity and art will flourish.
  • If people use your work you were kind enough to share, you would them to link to you as well. Not only is it appropriate, it’s also a gesture of appreciation.

So I decided to write a short manual to use Flickr (and for that matter, other CC licensed content) in a proper way. Continue reading →

Posted in blog tips | 7 Comments

Nouvelle Vague: French women get away with everything!

9 April 2008

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 for the cute accent.

Nouvelle Vague

I’m talking about Nouvelle Vague, a French musical collective led by musicians Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux. Their famous for their covers of legendary 80′s songs like Dancing with Myself, Love Will Tear us Apart, Just Can’t Get Enough and Blue Monday. Yesterday, my girlfriend and me went to see them in de Melkweg. Tristan Thomas already warned me on Twitter: the show was going to be impressive.

And it was, but not just for the sensual performance of the ladies, also because of the musical quality and the gifted musicians. Their version of Love Will Tear us Apart reminded me of Ian Curtis‘ intensity and In a Manner of Speaking is a tear jerker. I’ve made a playlist on Mixwit for you guys, so that you can enjoy la musique incroyable as well. Continue reading →

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

9 April 2008

Article of the DayEveryday 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 experiences, yet this isn’t a guarantee that it will turn out successfully for everyone. After all, it IS a bug. So in 2004 he decided to write a piece called ‘How to be creative‘:

All I was thinking about was a short, practical, real-world list of advice that would come in handy to somebody say, 10-20 years younger than me, somebody with the same “creative bug” I had when I was just starting out in the world. I was just trying pass along some valuable, pain-saving lessons to the next generation that I had learned along the way. No more, no less.

This list – full of eye-openers – has been download a million times now and inspired tons of people, including me. Especially his remark that creative people should have a “sexy” and a “cash” job helped me a lot. Some work you do is just for the sake of paying the bills, the other is for fun – it’s your creative outlet. When I build a blog for a company, I just do it to pay for my groceries. When I write a post on The Next Web or this blog, I do it because I love it. McLeod:

As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way- who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it.

McLeod now landed a book deal, which makes absolute sense. When I had read his article, I passed it on to everybody who has the same “creative bug”. They all loved it. So it’s absolutely worth a hard cover. The blogger annex cartoonist now lives in South Texas to focus on his writings. How romantic does that sound? His book will probably be released in the beginning of 2009, and just as Mr. Gapingvoid himself, I can’t wait.

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Videotheque The Kinker, for the newest American films!

8 April 2008

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:

Videotheek de Kinker in de Kinkerstraat te Amsterdam

Posted in cultural stuff | 2 Comments

Getting readers to comment by writing an unfinished blog post

6 April 2008

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.

Another subsversive commentSo when you’ve faced this fact, there are a couple of things you can do:

  • ignore it
  • accept it and use it as self-justification for the lack of comments
  • find ways to get your readers to comment

To be honest with you, I’ve often thought: Oh well, that’s just how things go in the blogosphere. And when Internet expert Bas van den Beld told me to invite readers to comment in my Next Web blog posts, I gladly did by ending articles with a question. Also, I came up with an original way to tell people how many readers participated in ‘the conversation’ on this blog. And sure, my ‘recent comments’ widget is always placed as high as possible (also a tip from Bas).

Yet I feel like I never made a real effort to work on the level of interactivity on my blogs. I’m busy enough with writing four to five articles a day, so should I also save time to lure my visitors to the comment form?

The answer is yes, I should get my readers to comment. Guess you can’t call yourself a blogger if you don’t stimulate your visitors to take part in the discussions. It’s all about interactivity after all.

So I started talking with other bloggers about how they fight this bloggers battle. Continue reading →

Posted in blog tips | 14 Comments

First time a story by me hits the Digg frontpage!

3 April 2008

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.

Digg frontpage

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

3 April 2008

Speakers’ dinner

Diggnation and champagne

The cooks

Sitting on the ground like a bunch of hippies
Continue reading →

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

2 April 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 a thousand words:

Bram Kok, Tim Heineke and me jumping
Photo by Lenniez

Tomorrow I’ll be conference blogging with Anne Helmond. We’ll literally cover ALL the speakers and presentations. If you’re planning on conference blogging as well, I suggest you read the article How I prepare for conference blogging. It contains some useful information.

By the way, if you like photos of jumping people, you should get familiar with the work of MAGNUM photographer Philippe Hausman. He was famous for photographing jumping celebrities.

Posted in personal | 3 Comments
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