Blog design is addictive. You can tweak pages endlessly, striving for perfection – which you’ll never reach. Don’t worry, it’s a fun addiction. Better than heroin, so to speak. Therefore, I’ve made a list of elements that are essential for a personal blog. Let it be the next shot you’ve longed for and get inspired.

Continue reading Personal Blog Design: 10 Essential Elements

Last June, I was facing a potential boring Sunday evening. So I twittered whether anyone knew an inspiring, rock ‘n’ rollish or just tough journalism movie. Man, I received a whole lotta great tips from my fellow twitter users. As a blogger at a newspaper, I loved the blogger-versus-journalists references in State of Play, dreamed of an All the President’s Men scenario and sang along with Tiny Dancer when watching…

Continue reading 16 Movies for Journalists, the Follow Up

For those of you who don’t know me: I’m a blogger at a Dutch quality newspaper. Last week I went to see State of Play, a movie about a grumpy old reporter who investigates a billion dollar scandal. He gets some help from a newspaper blogger. The funny situations – ‘I don’t have an opinion, maybe I should read some blogs’ – and the ‘damn fine reporting’ inspired me. They…

Continue reading 24 must-see movies for journalists (and 3 series)

Today I talked about my inspiration for blogging on the Web 2.0 Symposium in Budapest. I wanted to give the audience something to think about, instead of just give them an insight in my blogging mind. So I made a comparison between LSD and the Internet.

I came up with that comparison when I visited the exhibition Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era in The Whitney Museum of…

Continue reading Internet is the new LSD

There are three important ingredients for success. The first one? Hard work. The other two? Swagger and hustling.

On the day of Obama’s inauguration, two Dutch students crashed the Big Improvement Day – a meet-up of Holland’s finest in the public and private sector. After breaching security with fake press applications, they chose their places and waited for the highlight of the day: Sir Richard Branson.

An interactive SMS screen allowed…

Continue reading How to get more from life: hussle, have swagger & text Branson

Don’t you get tired of all those boring “How to be a better writer?”-posts. It’s the same thing all over again, “Have a unique voice”, “Love your commenters”, etcetera, etcetera. To help us all out, I’ve dug through the clutter and selected 36 posts that can help you become an original and all-round problogger. And because vanity is a blogger’s right, I’ve also included four articles by my own hand. Themes are Development & Design, Workflow, Publishing, Inspiration and Comments. Enjoy!

Continue reading Dig through the clutter: 40 must-reads for extraordinary bloggers

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

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?

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